Pulling Threads
by ArachneTheMaker
Summary: Red Hood needs to find the rest of the Untitled but has no idea where to look. He recruits Kairos, a young meta woman trained by Batman, to help in the search.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: This story picks up after the Night of the Owls and jumps through an AU until Requiem. Yeah, I know, skipping over Death of the Family is kinda uncool, but I wanted Jason and Co. to be other places doing other things. And, of course, I own nothing you recognize; that's all DC.**

**AN 2: At the suggestion of one of my reviewers, I went back through and tidied things up a bit; no major changes, just some polishing.**

"I know Batgirl just threatened to throw us in jail if we don't leave Gotham, but I don't think we can go just yet."

Roy looked up from the control panel of the alien craft, jaw slightly agape. Jason had obviously lost his mind. "What do you mean we can't go? I thought flying away from the Bats in an invisible spaceship would be a life-long dream of yours!"

"I must agree with Roy," said Kori. "We should be leaving as quickly as possible."

Jason's clenched his teeth slightly. "Can you just set the invisible spaceship on top of a damn building for a second?"

Roy shrugged and did what he asked, muttering something about how if a certain caped crusader ran into a certain invisible spaceship, he was not cleaning it off the windshield. He then turned his chair around to face Jason, crossing his arms over his chest. He saw that Kori had copied his pose, giving him her "Mess with me and I will blow a hole in you" glare. It made a shiver run down his spine.

Jason was pacing a little in front of them. "So we still have to find the Untitled…"

"I thought that you had avenged your teacher by killing the Untitled who was her killer," Kori said tersely.

Jason ran a hand through his hair. "I mean, that's what Essence said, but I don't know if I believe her any more. In any case, there are forces of pure fucking evil running amok in the world and the one thing that was keeping them in check is gone."

"Careful, Jason," said Roy. "This is starting to sound like super-hero talk, and you know how I feel about super-hero talk."

"Shut the hell up, Roy. If you guys don't want to do this, that's fine, but I'm going after the rest of the Untitled." Jason started to turn away.

"Cool it, man," said Roy, "I'm just messing with you. Of course, we'll help you hunt down the Untitled." He looked at Kori, who shrugged and nodded.

Jason took a deep breath and continued. "So we found the last one because of clues left in the Chamber of All, but we've got nothing to go on for the rest, so we're going to need some help." He took another deep breath and looked at the floor as he said, "I think we should contact Kairos."

Roy realized that Jason was waiting for a negative reaction after several seconds of uncomfortable silence. Luckily, Kori broke it. "Who is Kairos?" Roy could have kissed the girl for saying what he was thinking but didn't want to say for fear of looking like an idiot. Jason looked up sharply. "You guys don't know Kairos?" He saw the look of bewilderment that Roy guessed was on his face along with Kori's level gaze. "I guess she's managed to keep her low profile."

"Four years ago," Jason began after sitting down on a metal chest, "shortly before the Bruce did his big disappearing act, there was a series of strange occurrences where people would just go crazy and start arguing with whoever was around them. Sometimes it got violent, but afterwards, these people couldn't remember why they were fighting, only that they felt this overwhelming anxiety, like the world was ending or something. Batman figured it was Scarecrow trying out some new toxin, but all the tox screens came back clean. So the Replacement, being the good little detective he is, started going through all the CCTV footage and found that the same woman was nearby for a lot of the events. He and Bats tracked her down - she was a Master's student at Gotham University or something - but when they confronted her, she tells them that she knows she's the problem, but she's trying to get it under control. Turns out all the stress from school and parents and everything was getting to her, and her meta powers, which she'd been living with her whole life, were just going haywire, doing things she'd never been able to do before."

"What kind of powers are we talking about here?" asked Roy.

"Kairos can 'see'" - Jason used air quotes - "the relationships between people. She's gotten really good at interpreting whatever information it is that she's getting, so she would be able to tell that we were friends, sure, but she'd also be able to tell that I saved your life, that we've slept with the same girl -"

"I don't like being talked about like I'm not here," said Kori.

"Sorry, but she can tell a lot, and then she can see how things change based on what gets said, so sometimes she can figure out what to say in order to strengthen or break a relationship. She's like an interpersonal communications extraordinaire. What was happening was that she was accidentally projecting all of her own anxieties into other people's relationships. So of course, the fucking Bat immediately got her into crime fighting."

"I'm confused," said Roy. "She doesn't sound like a fighter."

"I agree," said Kori. "She sounds better suited for _diplomacy_." She said it like a bad word.

"You're not thinking this all the way through," said Jason. "She's, like, the ideal tool for tackling organized crime. She can map out the mob, then convince the low level guys to rat out their bosses when they get taken. Of course, those bosses still go free sooner or later, which is why Batman is such a failure -"

"Yeah, we don't need to hear that one again," said Roy. "Also, I thought that Batman had some serious trust issues with metas."

"Sure he does, but this meta has a skill set that he finds particularly useful. He's got no problem using her, but he's probably got a plan for taking her out anyway. Hell, he's probably even convinced her they're _family_ by now," Jason spat.

"So why do you think we should contact this Kairos?" asked Kori, still sounding unconvinced.

"The Untitled like to situate themselves in positions of power, to keep themselves comfortable and safe. You saw the way those people in Colorado acted when I took out the Untitled there. If anyone is going to pick up on that kind of weird fanaticism, it's Kairos." Jason looked at Kori, then Roy. "Look guys, I know the idea of working with a bat is, well, fucking ridiculous. And I don't even know if she'd even give us the time of day, but I'm out of ideas."

Kori shrugged. "I will follow your plan," she said simply. "This has been more fun than being on the island alone, at least."

Roy nodded his assent. "It sounds like she could help, so maybe you should give her a call."

Jason snorted. "Easier said than done. Maybe you guys could take off for a few days while I track her down? I can call you for a pick-up later."

A couple of days alone with Kori and an alien spaceship to tinker with? Roy didn't need to be asked twice.

Of course, knowing a mask's secret identity always made it easier to find her. After she finished her M.A. degree, Areopagitica "Eerie" Rice had taken a job as Bruce Wayne's personal assistant. Jason guessed it was so Kairos would have a good reason to be in those business meetings that often served as Batman's research trips, but the thought of keeping track of Bruce's calendar made him want to barf. Even worse, she lived in Wayne Manor's guest house, meaning she'd be at his beckon call 24 hours a day. From what Jason heard, she even tutored that little demon son of Bruce's too. _If nothing else_, thought Jason, _she might jump at the chance to get away from Demon Spawn for a few weeks._

Jason knew that Kairos spent most of her non-personal assistant time monitoring mob meetings, so his best bet for running into her on a rooftop would be to find out when some big meeting was happening and monitor it himself. This normally wouldn't be a problem for Red Hood, but the Talons' recent run through the city had everyone nervous. It took a couple of days for anything to turn up; after knocking a few heads and shooting a few feet, he learned that the Helie Brothers were meeting with their suppliers the next evening and felt pretty sure this was something Kairos wouldn't miss.

Jason found that a couple of his bases had gone undiscovered in his absence, and he was well-armed and fairly well-rested when he perched himself on the roof of a warehouse overlooking the supposed the meeting place. He began carefully scanning the surrounding rooftops as the mob bosses below exchanged terse words; he kept going back to one patch on shadow on another warehouse roof that seemed odd, but wasn't sure it was her until she shifted a little. She was lying flat on her stomach, binoculars poised against her face, and when Jason got his own binoculars out, he could see some movement in the fabric that covered the lower half of her face, suggesting she was talking to herself or someone else. _Hopefully herself,_ thought Jason. _The last thing I need is for her to call Batman and Demon Spawn as soon as she sees me._

He moved slowly to a closer position, but waited to approach her until the meeting was over and all parties had gone their separate ways. He was standing several yards away from her when she stood up and noticed him. Her face was still covered, but her body language suggested she had been startled. Pulling the cover on her lower face down around her neck, she said, "Red Hood. You're still in town."

Kairos wore the skin-tight Kevlar suit favored by the bats in dark gray. Her emblem - an eight-pointed asterisk-looking thing - was on her chest in a slightly darker color, almost invisible. Over this, she wore a cape and hood in a similar color, but textured to look like concrete; Jason supposed this would make good camouflage but he'd never been one for subtlety himself. The hood pulled up to hook to the top of her mask, which covered the upper half of her face; the fabric that had covered the lower half was scrunched up around her throat like a turtle-neck sweater.

"Well, you know how it is," Jason said. "Gotham just pulls you in and never lets you go."

"I'm guessing you've come to me for a reason." She was frowning, but the white-out lenses in her mask made it impossible to really read her features.

At one point in his life, Jason would have goaded her a bit because she was a meta, because she was a bat, because she was on the right side, whatever the hell that meant. Tonight, though, he had more important things to worry about. "I'm working a case and I've hit a dead end. I was hoping you would help."

He could tell that surprised her. It was almost like, in the silence that followed, she was trying to think of the right comeback, like it was a "What would Batman do?" - or, even worse "What would Dick fucking Grayson do?" - moment. He watched her jaw clench and then relax as she made a decision. "What kind of case is it?" she asked.

"What, no 'I don't kill people' speech? Daddy Bats will be disappointed." Okay, maybe he couldn't resist goading just a little bit.

Her jaw clenched again. "You seem to be mistaking me for one of his sons," she said in a clipped tone. "I've looked you up, Red Hood, and you've killed a lot of people, but no one could ever accuse you of killing an innocent. I figured I'd hear you out first and then decide if the proposed action would violate _my_ moral code." The way she emphasized "my" made Jason think that maybe she wasn't so happy with Batman's way of doing things after all. Or maybe she was just pissed about the "Daddy Bats" thing.

"After my resurrection, I was taken in by an ancient order called the All-Caste," Jason began, sitting on the edge of the roof. "Their primary objective was to defend the world against an evil race called the Untitled, once-humans who drank from a well that was the source of all evil and so on and so forth." He glanced at her; she still appeared to be listening attentively, so she hadn't written him off just yet. "Recently, the All-Caste were massacred, supposedly by the Untitled. Whether that's true or not, it still means that we have an ancient evil without its counterpart..."

"And you are the one who will bring balance to the force," Kairos said, putting on a mystical voice.

Jason smirked. "Normally, I kick the ass of anyone who compared me to a whiny shit like Anakin Skywalker, but I am asking for your help after all."

"And how exactly are you planning to return the balance?"

"By destroying the Untitled. They're powerful, but not unstoppable, and the All-Caste equipped me for the fight."

"So it does come down to killing."

"If returning an ancient evil to its home, far away from humankind, is killing, then yeah, I guess so."

Kairos pursed her lips. "Why do you need me?" she asked.

"The Untitled disguise themselves as humans in positions of moderate power: enough to stay comfortable, not enough to be noticed. They manage to insinuate themselves into communities so that when they're killed, the people around them go crazy. I had help tracking down the first one, but now that help has dried up. I was hoping that, with your special talents, you could help me find the others."

Kairos was quiet in thought, and Jason let her think. She finally said, "I'm kind of taking you at your word that they're evil."

"The moment you're in front of one in its true form, you won't doubt me."

"That's terribly convenient."

Jason sighed. "It's the best I can do. We could make a deal, no killing unless you give the go-ahead."

"And you would keep that deal?"

"I may kill people, but I keep promises," Jason said firmly, looking her straight in the eye.

Kairos sighed and shifted her weight back and forth a few times. "I need to think about it. How can I contact you later?"

Jason had come prepared for this; he pulled a prepaid cell phone out of one of his pockets and tossed it to her. "Just call the number on the contact list," he said.

She nodded, put the phone somewhere in the cape, and took off into the night.

All in all, Jason thought it had gone alright.


	2. Chapter 2

Kairos ran a few blocks away from her chance encounter with Red Hood before crouching behind a vent and pulling her knees up to her chest. Her heart was pounding and she tried to take deep breaths. _Fucking Red Hood_, she thought. She had been expecting a bullet in her gut, not an offer for a job. Not that she had any reason to think that Red Hood would want to hurt her, but Tim and Damian both talked like the guy had no moral compass or sense of propriety at all. In fact, it was the the one thing they seemed to agree on.

As her heart rate slowed and her breathing returned to normal, Kairos began to notice the way the sweat running down her sides had started to itch. Twisting her torso to try to scratch her sides against the slightly-rough inside of her suit, she tried to organize her thoughts into a list. First, she would return to the cave and document what she had learned tonight about the Helie Brothers' operation. Second, she would check in on Batman and Robin; they were supposed to be tracking some Talons and she didn't want anyone disappearing into a secret underground labyrinth again. Third, she would decide if she even wanted to consider Red Hood's offer.

She told herself, as she started moving across the rooftops again back to where she had left her bike, that she had only taken the phone because it gave her a better chance of getting away without getting shot. Bruce would probably have a fit if she tried to leave for a while, even if it wasn't with Red Hood. Really, she should just call Hood as soon as she got back and tell him she couldn't do it.

On her way back to the cave, though, she kept going over the information she had picked up from Red Hood, what she had seen in the invisible strings attaching him to other people. He was working with Arsenal and Starfire and obviously cared about them, he seemed to have some kind of relationship with a monster named Crux who he _hadn't_ killed, and the burning hatred he'd held toward Batman the last time she'd seen him had mellowed. She might have even sensed a tinge of regret running along the thread to Tim.

Of course, metaphors of threads could never adequately explain what she "saw", but it did keep her from going crazy with sensory overload. At least if she imposed the metaphor on herself, she had some way of figuring out what feelings were being directed toward whom. And Red Hood had a lot of feelings - some positive, more negative, all strong.

Back in the cave, she sat down at the big computer console and, after removing her mask, took out the removable drive that captured video from the lenses and audio from a microphone in the lower face cover. Tim had rigged it up for her years ago so she could keep notes about who she was looking at and his or her connections without having to look away or know names. She had started the process of uploading the data and tagging it appropriately when Alfred came down the stairs behind her with a tea service. "What will it be tonight, Miss Eerie?" he asked in that ever-comforting British accent. "Caffeinated or herbal?"

"Herbal, please," she answered, looking up at him. "Bruce has a 9 o'clock meeting tomorrow, so after I get this taken care of, I'm turning in. Speaking of which, have Batman and Robin checked in?"

"Not in the last two hours," Alfred answered as he began preparing the tea.

"Okay, I'll check up on them, then." Eerie turned back to the console and pulled out her comm device. "Batman, this is Kairos. What's your status?"

Batman responded quickly, suggesting he was in the car. "I'm en route to collect Robin, then we're returning to the cave."

"Copy that," Eerie replied before hitting a button on the comm. "Robin, this is Kairos. What's your status?"

Eerie heard some heavy breathing and distant screams before Robin answered. "Your timing is terrible as usual, but I can assure you that I haven't lost myself to some evil secret society yet."

Eerie couldn't help rolling her eyes as she answered. "Copy that, Robin. Batman is en route to your location."

"I don't need help!" Robin snapped, and in the background Eerie heard the heavy thud of a boot meeting flesh.

"Well good, because he's only giving you a ride," Eerie snapped back. "Kairos out." Alfred set a steaming mug of tea in front of her as she leaned back in the large chair. "Alfred, I think my patience with Damien is wearing a little thin," she admitted as she picked up the mug.

"Yes," said Alfred, "I believe we all have those moments with Master Damien." She smiled; Alfred acknowledging impatience was something noteworthy. She continued to tinker with the computer, filing her notes from the night, linking some faces from the video footage with police mug shots, and sipping on the warm tea, while Alfred returned upstairs with the tea service. When she couldn't justify any more time on obsessive note-taking, she started searching for some of the things Red Hood had mentioned: the Untitled, the All-Caste. She quickly ended the search, though, when the Batmobile roared into the cave, and out emerged a tense pair of crime-fighters; obviously they had been engaged in some kind of argument in the car. Even without her special skills, Eerie would have been able to tell that Damien had done something that Bruce saw as crossing a line, but he had no reasons for justifying that line that Damien would value. She couldn't help rolling her eyes again; two rhetors talking at cross-purposes until they were blue in the face.

Damien stomped off to the showers, but Bruce stopped behind her chair, pulling his cowl down. "Who'd you see tonight?" he asked.

For a second, Eerie's heart jumped into her throat. _He knows!_ she thought. _He knows I saw Red Hood and he's pissed I didn't take him down!_ Instead, she answered, "The Helie Brothers meeting with a supplier. Looks like they've gone international." Her voice shook a little.

Bruce grunted, apparently not noticing her nervousness, and headed toward the showers himself. Eerie took this opportunity to change her own clothes and flee the Manor entirely after dropping her mug into the kitchen sink. During the walk out to the guest house she had called home for the last three and a half years, she considered her options. She didn't really want to call the Red Hood back tonight; it would make it seem like she hadn't thought about his offer at all, and she didn't want to get on his bad side. She also felt like she wasn't seeing the situation properly. She didn't feel like the right person to judge what it meant that a vigilante like Red Hood had turned his attention to this kind of aliens and/or magic type case, since his previous work had mostly involved drug cartels, human trafficking, and domestic terrorism. (Eerie knew this because Bruce kept tabs on Jason, and Eerie made it her business to know what Bruce was keeping tabs on.)

Eerie pushed open the front door that she never bothered to lock and immediately flopped on the lumpy futon-turned-sofa that she had had since high school; Bruce had insisted that he would furnish the guest house, but Eerie had refused. She pulled out her phone, suddenly deciding that Dick was exactly the person to talk to. Luckily, his circus was currently in town, and him with it. She sent him a text. "Need to talk. Brunch tomorrow? Done with Bruce at 10:30."

Eerie knew that Dick would still be up, and sure enough her phone beeped with a quick reply. "Amici's? Everything okay?"

She answered. "Strange run-in tonight. Everything is fine; only *considering* doing something dangerous. See you at Amici's."

The phone beeped again as she dragged herself to the bedroom. "I'm always in favor of doing the dangerous thing :)." She snorted. If Dick only knew...

Eerie was only slightly groggy when she got out of bed the following morning and climbed into the shower. She ran a brush through her pixie cut without bothering to blow-dry it; it would be dry enough by the time they got to the office. She had just finished putting on her make-up and stuffing everything she needed for the day in a bag when Alfred honked the horn outside. Bruce was in the back seat of the car with a dozen notes about the developer he was meeting that morning. Supposedly Mr. Keid's company had designed a more efficient way to manufacture solar panels, but Bruce wanted Eerie to make sure that Keid actually believed what he was saying. And to, you know, look for any connections to law-breakers while she was at it.

The meeting itself was incredibly boring, especially since Keid genuinely meant every word that came out of his mouth. Eerie dutifully took notes and uploaded them to Bruce's private server as Bruce shook hands with Keid for the last time. "Well?" he said after he shut the door.

"He's on the up-and-up," said Eerie. "It sounds like a good investment to me." She started putting things back in her bag. "I'm meeting Dick for brunch. Any messages you'd like me to pass along?"

"Just say hi."

"Sure thing."

Eerie started toward the door, but stopped when Bruce said her name. "Eerie, is everything alright? You seemed agitated last night."

_Of course he noticed, _she thought. _He's the damn Batman_. "Yeah, well, you know me, I'll always find something to be anxious about." She shifted her bag and didn't meet his eyes.

"And what is it right now?" Bruce had these occasional moments of expressing concern about the emotional lives of those around him, but he was especially nosy about hers, since her feeling anxious (and sometimes not taking her meds) sometimes resulted in outbursts of paranoia and violence on the part of others.

"Just...thinking about the long term. Maybe feeling a little burnt out with watching mobsters pop in and out of jail." She still couldn't look at him; he wasn't going to like that answer at all. But really, she _was _burnt out. She kept putting in untold numbers of hours watching the same organized groups do illegal things with little to show for it.

She might not have been looking, but she could feel Bruce get tense. She could also tell that his thoughts had turned to Jason, with all the anger and frustration and sorrow that characterized his end of that relationship. "That's a dangerous way to be thinking," he finally said.

"I know," she answered. "That's why I'm seeing Dick."

Bruce nodded. "Alfred will be here at 2," he said.

"I'll be back by then," Eerie said and almost ran out the office door.

The walk to Amici's a few blocks from Wayne Tower calmed her immensely, and by the time she sat down across from Dick at the diner, she almost felt able to talk about the previous night. Almost.

"So," she said, scanning the menu, "what's your plans now that your latest girlfriend is in jail for trying to kill you?"

Dick snorted. "You didn't waste any time bringing that up."

"I see no reason to dance around the issues," Eerie said, smirking at him.

Dick sat back in his chair. "Actually, I'm thinking about trying to keep Haley's in Gotham. As a permanent attraction."

"That would be good. Damien misses you."

"He said that?"

"Oh God no, but he's been extra insolent since you've been traveling."

A waitress took their orders and menus, and Dick leaned forward to settle his arms on the table. "So what did you want to talk about?"

Eerie sighed and leaned forward too. "I ran into someone last night," she began. "Jason."

Dick's eyes got a little wide. "I mean, I knew Babs had run into him during the whole Owls thing, but I figured he was long gone. What did he want?"

Eerie shrugged. "He wants my help on a case he's working. A mystical thing. I couldn't find much in the databases about the groups he mentioned, but what I did find seemed to corroborate his claims that there's some evil things wandering around without their usual incentives to not do something extra bad."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I needed to think about it."

"And now that you've thought about it?"

Eerie didn't say anything for a few long seconds. "If anyone else was offering me a consulting gig," she said, "I'd take it in a heartbeat. I need to get out of Gotham for a while. Bruce and Damien have been even more..." she paused to search for a word.

"Crabby?" Dick offered, smiling.

"Yes, crabby, since the Owls thing, Damien because he saw his father as vulnerable for the first time, and Bruce because his son saw him as less-than-perfect and he doesn't know what to do about it. It's grating on my nerves."

"I can sympathize," said Dick, "but it's not just anybody."

"No, it's not."

Another pause, then Dick asked, "How was he?"

"Okay, I think. I guess he's working with Arsenal and Starfire now." Eerie paused to see how Dick would react to hearing that his former best friend and former lover had both taken up with a man who had tried to kill him, but his look of general concern never wavered. "His feelings toward Bruce have, well, mellowed. I mean, he's still mad, but I don't think 'vengeful' is the word to describe him anymore. I think he's started to feel sorry for the things he did to you and Tim. Maybe even Damien too."

Dick looked down at his hands on the table before speaking. "You know, I always thought that given some time and, well, love, Jason would get back to his old self." And Eerie could see that; more than Bruce, more than either of his other adopted brothers, Dick believed that Jason was good, no matter how bad he acted. "I'm glad he's with Roy and Kori," Dick continued. "If anyone knows what it's like to be hurt and hurt others, it's them." He paused. "Are you going to join them?"

Eerie fiddled with her silverware before answering. "I think I want to. The case sounds interesting; it has nice, clear-cut good-and-evil objectives. But the idea of explaining to Bruce that I'm about to go off with Jason Todd is terrifying."

Dick nodded. "Yeah, he's not always the best at trusting other people's judgment. But Jason hasn't tried to kill any of us in a few years now, so Bruce is probably wondering how his prodigal son is doing. Beyond, you know, tracking his kills and watching him rise on Interpol's most wanted list."

"You're making me feel so much better about this."

"I'm not denying that Jason went kind of crazy for a while. And I can see now how Bruce's message to him in his will did not help with defusing the crazy."

"Yeah, calling someone 'broken' is never a good way to open dialogue."

"Well, emotions have never been Bruce's strong point. I think that's one of the reasons he was so keen to bring you on, back in the day. You gave him a way of understanding the emotional lives of others. His own as well, when it comes down to it."

"You mean I gave him a way to use the emotional lives of others in his crusade." Eerie was getting a little annoyed.

"For Bruce, it's the same thing," Dick said with a sad smile. "In any case, if you want to work with Jason, I'll back you up. I'll also tell you to sleep with a batarang and any number of other weapons under your pillow, if you sleep at all, but I'll back you up nonetheless." Dick's reassuring smile turned a little sheepish when he asked, "So which one of them is sleeping with Kori?"

Eerie raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to know?"

Dick grimaced. "No, I guess I don't."

That evening, Eerie came out of the changing area in the cave to find Bruce hunched over the computer console, looking over her notes from the previous night's stake-out. "I think we're ready to move on the Helie Brothers," he said when he heard her footsteps behind him.

"Good," she said, "because I've picked up a consulting job, and I'll probably be gone for a while."

Bruce never looked up from the screen. "The League again?"

"No," Eerie said and steeled herself with deep breath. "Red Hood."

Bruce's fingers stopped moving on the keyboard. She could almost hear his teeth grinding. "Red Hood asked you to work with him?"

"Yes, he's taken up this magic-related case, but his trail on the bad guys has gone cold."

"You do realize that this is probably saving their lives."

"From what I can tell so far, these aren't guys who should be saved. Or even really have lives. We're talking ancient evil kind of stuff."

"That's...different for him." Eerie heard the implicit question; Bruce wanted to know how Jason was, if he was ready to change, to return to the path of righteousness. She couldn't answer those questions, so instead she said, "I suppose so. He certainly didn't seem interested in encountering any bats other than me." She hoped the message was clear, that Jason wasn't looking for revenge at the moment.

"This was what had you upset last night?"

"I wouldn't have called it 'upset..."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Eerie walked around the big chair to lean against the console and face Bruce. His cowl was up and his face was impassive, but she could see the thread connecting him to Jason was writhing around with the heat of his feelings. "Because you're not always super chill when it comes to issues involving Jason Todd," she answered, "so I went to talk to Dick first."

Bruce at least seemed to see the sense in that; his jaw relaxed a hair. "And you're sure you want to take this job? That it's not a trap?"

"I may not be able to see what anybody feels towards me," Eerie replied, "but if this was a trap, I'd be able to see it in his connection to you and Dick and the rest. And it's just a consulting job. It'll be like a working vacation."

"It is not _just_ a consulting job."

"Superman tried to kill you once, and you didn't have a problem when I took a couple of days to help him out."

Bruce didn't like her bringing that up, and really, Eerie knew it wasn't fair. But Bruce lost all claims to objectivity as soon as Jason was the topic of conversation. "How long will you be away?" he asked.

"No idea."

"We can't really count this as vacation days, then," he said. "You'll have to take an unpaid leave of absence. I'll tell anyone who asks that you're caring for a terminally-ill friend."

If he was thinking about her front as Wayne employee, she had won. "I don't mind," she said. "It's not like my expenses are even close to matching the exorbitant amount you pay me to watch you talk to people. I got a lot in savings."

Bruce let out a breath. "I don't like this," he said. "I want a check-in from you every three days with your location. If anything happens, contact me or Dick immediately. And I will be following your credit card transactions."

Eerie sighed a little. "For someone who told me that I was _not_ another adopted child, you're acting a lot like a dad right now."

"No," he said, "I'm acting like a team leader sending a soldier into an unknown and possible dangerous situation."

"You're not sending me, I'm choosing to go." Eerie wanted this distinction to be very clear.

"That may be so," Bruce said, "but I would like to know how Jason is."

Eerie waited until she got back from patrol to dig the phone out of her cape and call the pre-programmed number. "Yes," said a voice on the other end of the line.

"Red Hood?"

"Who the fuck did you think you were calling?"

"I'm in."


	3. Chapter 3

Jason finished making arrangements with Kairos, then tossed the burner off into a pile of junk in the corner of the room. This safehouse was small, really just big enough for a cot and a couple of boxes of supplies with a toilet in an alcove, but Jason hadn't done a great job of keeping in clean during his stay. _Have to take care of that tomorrow_, he thought as he reached for his real phone and called Roy. No surprise that Roy didn't pick up; Jason wasn't sure what time it was on the island, but even if Roy wasn't asleep, he and Kori were probably humping like rabbits. So, he left a message at the beep. "Roy, it's Jason. Kairos is on board. Pick us up at midnight at the entrance to Presby State Park outside Gotham." Then, Jason went back to sleep.

Normally, a person might spend a free day in their hometown revisiting old haunts, but Gotham didn't hold many good memories for Jason. He went out for chili dogs at one point, but the rest of the day was spent in the safehouse, sharpening knives, cleaning guns, and doing a little tinkering. It was about an hour until sunset before he got around to cleaning up the place so it wouldn't be a complete wreck the next time he dropped in. He spent a couple of hours renewing some of his contacts as Red Hood, which largely involved dropping in on people and scaring the piss out of them. Everyone knew that Red Hood wasn't in Gotham all the time now, but Jason liked to encourage the idea that he could be watching at any moment. Then, he stole a car and drove out to Presby Park.

He had just settled himself on the hood of said car to wait when Kairos came out of the shadows. He had figured she'd get there early to make sure it wasn't a trap, but was pleased to see that she had listened to his instructions to pack light; she carried a green backpack and nothing else. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a green backpack kind of person," he said by way of greeting.

She shrugged. "If I had to wear dark gray all the time, I'd shoot myself." She set the backpack on the ground and settled onto the hood with him.

Red Hood looked around, but didn't see another vehicle anywhere. "How did you get out here?"

"Nightwing gave me a lift."

Red Hood couldn't keep the sneer out of his voice. "Dickiebird didn't want to stick around and say hello."

"Honestly, I think he was more worried about the possibility of running into Starfire than the prospect of seeing you."

He was a little taken aback, but he guessed it made sense. After all, Dick had always been the one who seemed to really mean what he said about getting Jason help, and seeing a girl you had proposed to who had completely forgotten about you _and _taken up with a former best friend? That would majorly suck.

There was a silence that wasn't entirely comfortable. Finally Kairos said, "About our whole no-killing-until-I-know-the-guys-are-evil deal?"

_Just like a bat to worry about that_, thought Jason. "What about it?"

"Well, you said you kept promises, not deals."

Red Hood couldn't help but laugh. "You're about to go on a mission with known killers and wanted fugitives, and you're worried about fucking semantics?"

She didn't back down. "You want me because of my skills, and my skills mean that I see the effects of words on the material world more clearly that almost anybody else. Yes, I worry about semantics."

"Fine, you want me to promise not to kill anybody until you say it's okay?"

"At least not anybody I help you track down."

That was an interesting distinction, and it definitely gave Jason some leeway none of the other bats would have tolerated. "Okay, I promise not to kill anyone that you help us track down until you verify for yourself that they are, in fact, pure fucking evil."

Kairos nodded, satisfied. They settled into another uncomfortable silence. Red Hood started to wish he hadn't given up smoking just so he'd have something to do. "We got a couple of ground rules," he said, just to say something. "Everybody cleans up after themselves, so do your own dishes. We trade off who cooks dinner, so you'll have to take your turn. And if you want to keep booze, keep it in your room. Roy's a recovering alcoholic."

"Where did you get this car?" Kairos asked suddenly.

"Stole it." Kairos glared at him. "What? I had to get out here somehow, and I left some gas money in the glove box. The park guys will find it tomorrow and call the cops, and they'll get it back to the owner all in one nice piece."

Kairos continued to glare but didn't say anything. Luckily, Roy picked that moment to land the ship in the clearing in front of them. Red Hood stalked toward the boarding ramp, and Kairos picked up her bag and followed. Roy and Kori had already spun their chairs around to see the new recruit, and Jason flopped onto one of the supplies chests that formed a bench against the wall as he said, "This is Roy Harper, aka Arsenal, and Princess Koriand'r, aka Starfire. This is Areopagitica Rice, aka Kairos." He supposed he should wait to see if she wanted to give her name or not, but she had annoyed him with the whole thing about the car, and really, it wasn't fair for her to have the upper hand on them. Plus, he'd practiced saying her first name in the safehouse earlier.

"Area-what-tica?" Roy said.

Kairos waved it off with her hand. "My parents were Milton scholars," she explained. "I go by Eerie. It's nice to meet both you."

"You too," said Roy. He looked over at Jason. "Where to, boss?"

"Back home for now," Jason answered. "We gotta do some research before Kairos can work her magic."

"Alrighty," Roy replied. "Eerie, I pride myself on the smoothness of my flights, but you should probably sit down."

Eerie was definitely feeling overwhelmed. Jason had mentioned the alien spacecraft that was their primary mode of transportation and the deserted island that served as a secret base, but hearing about it and experiencing it were two different things. Roy chattered about all the different modifications he had made to the much larger space ship that Kori (and now Roy and Jason) lived in as he gave her the grand tour, ending in front of what were to be her quarters. Jason had disappeared soon after they had touched down; his negative feelings about Gotham were at the forefront of his mind, and Eerie guessed he needed some time to decompress. Or go kill some things.

"So you can settle in here," said Roy. "We'll probably all be sleeping for a few hours, and when you're up and ready, I'll be happy to show you around the computer system. Not that I think you don't know how to use computers," he added quickly. "It's just, you know, alien." He fiddled with his hat.

"Thanks," she said. "I'll have to see what kinds of contacts I have that could be useful." She went in the room that was hers without looking back.

It was small but serviceable. The only piece of furniture was a bed, but she didn't really think she would need anything else. The blank walls didn't really look like they were part of a spaceship. Sitting her bag on the bed, Eerie pulled out her new cell phone. Her old one had been strictly for her civilian life, left at home during any mask activities. But given that Bruce was expecting regular check-ins, he had presented her with a specially encrypted device that Tim had been tinkering with. If had a civilian mode and a mask mode that were kept completely separate, requiring a number of passcodes to switch between. She couldn't even pretend to know know how it worked, but it was easy enough to activate the GPS signal and type a quick message to the Batcave computer with the attached coordinates before giving her Twitter feed a quick scan for anything worth filing away for future reference.

That done, Eerie removed the various pieces of her costume, took her various pills, and lay down in the bed to attempt some sleep. It wasn't easy; her mind kept running through what-ifs and possible future conversations with her temporary teammates. Especially Jason. Eerie had been around during his play for taking up the cowl after Bruce's supposed death, but she had heard about Jason's actions only second hand from Dick, Tim, and Damian. Dick, at least, had turned to her for help making sense of Jason's actions and his feelings about them; he hadn't understood why Bruce's message was so upsetting for Jason. Eerie still rolled her eyes when she thought about that, but really, what could you expect from a bunch of folks who judged mental health based on how badly a person hurt other people while wearing a costume?

Eerie had spent the short ride to the island studying Jason out of the corner of her eye. His relationship with Roy and Kori (who were definitely sleeping together, but something was off there) was strong, and it looked like he and Tim had been in contact recently, an exchange that had left Jason with good feelings about the younger former Robin. She had noticed that when he brought Dick up back in the park, her answer about Kori had calmed the sudden burst of jealousy she had seen. He definitely still hated Damien, but it didn't look like he was interested in hurting the kid. But what was much more interesting was his relationship with the dead woman Ducra; given the intertwining bits of respect, resentment, fear, and admiration, Eerie guessed the woman had been a teacher, perhaps one of the All-Caste Jason had mentioned before. If that were so, his vendetta against the Untitled wasn't entirely philanthropic, and for some reason, knowing that Jason did in fact have some personal reasons for wanting to take the evil guys out made the whole thing feel more, well, normal. It meant that Jason Todd hadn't completely changed in the few years since Eerie had last encountered him, which would be a cause for concern.

Eerie rolled on to her other side in the small bed and forced her face to relax. Tomorrow, she would ask about Ducra and get some answers. She tried focusing on her breathing to get her mind to quiet a bit, picturing the intrusive thoughts as spiderlings floating away on their little silk tethers, and after a while, fell into a restless sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

"So did you have trouble talking her into it?" Roy asked Jason as the two ate eggs and toast the following morning. Kori had been gone when Roy woke up - probably out swimming with some dolphins or something - but Jason was cooking in the small kitchen area and grunted at Roy's sunny greeting.

"Not really," said Jason. "Maybe she wants out from under the Bat."

Roy made a noncommittal noise and shoveled more eggs in his mouth. While he knew a thing or two about overbearing mentors, he didn't know enough about Eerie to make a judgement. He just hoped that she could do what Jason thought she could do so they could get rid of the Untitled and then maybe Jaybird would chill out a bit. Not that he wasn't always intense, but Roy worried that Jason was starting to obsess over the Untitled like he used to obsess over Batman. Maybe for better reasons, but still.

"I'm starting to wonder if bringing her here was a good idea," said Jason, but before Roy could inquire further, the hatch to the communal room opened with _her_ on the other side. Compared to Jason and Roy, who had taken to wearing swim trunks pretty much all the time on the island (Jason occasionally donned a t-shirt as well, like he had this morning), Eerie was overdressed in skinny jeans and a cardigan. Her hair was still damp, suggesting that she managed figuring out how to work the shower, but she had dark circles under her eyes. Roy could feel Jason glowering a bit beside him, so he said brightly, "Morning, Eerie! Want some eggs?"

"Yes, thank you," she answered, "and some coffee if you have it."

"You'll have to make another pot," Jason said darkly. "Roy drank the last one."

Roy made a dismissive noise and bustled around, starting the coffee pot and fixing Eerie a plate of eggs and toast, which he sat next to Jason's spot at the table, forcing Eerie to sit on the bench next to him. He smiled as he went to stand beside the coffee pot, watching Jason visibly stiffen; that guy was seriously unnerved by the girl, though that might be because of her bat status. On the other hand, Roy had seen Jason have a relatively pleasant conversation with Tim Drake, so maybe it has less to do with her being a bat and more to do with her powers...

"Oh fuck," Roy exclaimed, "You can see everything we're thinking right now, can't you?!"

Eerie looked up startled, immediately realizing that Roy was talking about her. "It doesn't work like that," she said quickly. "I don't read minds. I just see relationships."

"Yeah, but that might as well be the same thing," Roy continued, narrowing his eyes a little.

"Geez, Roy, you knew this before she got here, and you're just now freaking out about it," said Jason, rolling his eyes.

"Well maybe I was thinking that she'd just be spying on the bad guys," countered Roy. "But you can see everybody, can't you?"

"Well, yeah," Eerie said. "It's not something I can _not _see. It's just there all the time, like the noise of the waves is here. But it's also not like mind-reading. For example, I can tell right now that Jason is annoyed with you, but I don't know exactly why. I also know that you're with Kori, but it's not like I can just rifle through your memories to pull out the naughty bits."

Roy blushed a little; the naughty bits were quite naughty. But he pressed on. "But you still see things about people that they may not want to be seen."

"There's no getting around that," she answered. "But unless someone is a serious criminal or not saying something is going to result in people getting hurt, _I keep my mouth shut._"

The last words had venom in them, and Roy realized that she must go through this a lot, not having people trust her. He felt a bit sheepish at his reaction and reached up to rub the back of his head. "Sorry, I guess I just didn't think this through," he said. "And I gotta lot of shit I don't want dug up."

"I've found that most people do," she answered. "Myself included."

The coffee was done, and Roy poured a mug as Eerie returned to her eggs. He looked at Jason as he set the mug down in front of her. "Roy Harper," Jason said, shaking his head. "Engineering genius one day, idiot the next."

Roy grinned. "You're leaving out the days where I manage to be both." He sat down across from Eerie. "So, I'm happy to show you our computers today, but it might help if I had some idea of what the plan is."

Eerie downed a big gulp of coffee before she could respond. "Well, that's a good question. I think I need some more information before I can really get started." She looked expectantly at Jason, and Roy knew that she knew this whole thing was Jason's vendetta.

Jason heaved a sigh and began recounting the story from the beginning, when Essence appeared to him shortly after he and Kori had rescued Roy. He finished by explaining his suspicions about Essence after their last encounter and what had brought them to Gotham City in the first place. Eerie finished her eggs and toast while he talked and stared into her coffee cup a few moments after he finished. "So," she said finally, "it sounds like the best thing we have to go on is going to be the details from the fake-cop situation. It suggests that the Untitled will prefer positions of power in small communities. But we shouldn't rule out the affordances of large cities for going unnoticed." Jason shrugged. "Any idea how this works? I mean, are they taking up new bodies as needed, or are these the same unaging bodies from forever ago?"

Jason thought for a second. "Ducra and Essence have both aged, but not normally. But they've also been working to purge themselves of the evil of the well. Also, there was nothing to suggest that I would have been confronting a black woman as an Untitled, so my guess would be that the well granted them the ability to shape-shift."

"Okay," said Eerie. "That means that missing persons cases won't help, but instances of sudden changes in personality might, since that could highlight both the Untitled and the humans under their control."

"You do realize that we're looking for, like, twelve people in the entire world," Roy interjected. "Missing persons cases probably wouldn't have been good place to start."

"I know, but we can set up a few different parameters and look at the intersections," Eerie answered. "We just have to figure out the right parameters to be able to work down to a data set that's manageable." She turned back to Jason. "Did the Untitled or Essence mention anything else that might help us identify the Untitled?"

"Well, the fake cop lady did say something about eating my liver to learn everything I knew," Jason said.

Eerie looked pleased. "Excellent. Missing livers will definitely be documented." She shoved the last of the eggs and a final bite of toast in her mouth and downed the rest of the coffee, then looked expectantly at Roy, who smiled and said, "Let's go."

Jason stayed seated at the table, muttering something about them leaving their dishes for him to wash, and Roy led Eerie back through another hatch and down the hall to the computer lab/workshop he'd set up. When they entered the room, one of the hovering surveillance bots he'd been tinkering with few up into his face and said, "THE ROY HAS ENTERED WITH UNKNOWN INDIVIDUAL. IS THIS ROY-FRIEND?"

"Yes, Eye-Bot, Kairos is designated as Roy-Friend," he said to the bot, which immediately gave Eerie a good once over. To her, he said, "I've been working on beefing up our security here. Only a matter of time before folks figure out that we call this home."

"Batman already knew," she answered, staring back at the bot. "He keeps really close tabs on Jason. But it's not in the League files yet."

"Good to know," said Roy as he sat down at the computer. "So how are you with computers?"

"I use what Batman and friends give me and I don't ask questions." Eerie pulled a second chair up to the monitor.

Roy spent the next hour explaining how to do things on the system Crux had designed and he had modified (explaining about Crux in the process). Then, as Eerie started making her initial inquiries, Roy started trying to connect her phone to the Omni, after Eerie explained to him the dual operating systems in the vaguest terms possible. She wasn't kidding; she didn't really know anything about computers.

As he tinkered with it, admiring handiwork that he assumed was Drake's, he asked, "So what are you going to look at first?"

"Well," Eerie started, "through Batman I have access to international police reports anywhere they get filed electronically, so I'm setting up a search for homicide victims with missing livers where it doesn't look like organ harvest was the goal. Then I'm going to set up a search of the League's UFO files for reports of shapeshifters, and then look at the overlap."

"The League keeps UFO files?"

"Yeah, they have a whole server that collects and evaluates UFO reports and possible ET sightings, and sometimes a Leaguer goes to check out the ones that seem most credible."

"But you're not a League member, are you? So how do you have access to their files?"

"I do consulting work with them in exchange for access."

"What kind of consulting?" Roy was finished with the phone and set it on the console by Eerie before leaning against it himself. "You, like, spy on people for them?"

Eerie looked up at him and shrugged. "Kinda, I guess. Most extraterrestrial work. For my last case, one of the Green Lanterns took me out to some big interplanetary trade negotiation between two factions with a long history of hostility. He was worried about the way the two primary representatives kept delaying a decision. Turned out to be a real Romeo and Juliet story; the two reps had secretly been engaged for years, and so the negotiations were about personal issues more than economic ones."

"Did it work out?"

"Dunno, after I figured that out, Lantern sent me home."

That sounded like the League alright: use a person then dump 'em. But Roy had decided long ago not to dwell on, especially when Waylon gave him the choice of forgetting or forgiving. He was much better at forgetting.


	5. Chapter 5

The next couple of days proceeded much as the first had: Eerie sat in front of the computer and did research while Jason beat himself up for thinking bringing her here was a good idea. When Roy cornered him in the training room to ask what was bothering him, Jason shrugged it off, citing fatigue and paranoia. But he couldn't help thinking about how exposed he and Roy and Kori were, not just to people finding them and bringing them to "justice" (whatever the hell that meant), but also to their own messed up emotions. Eerie was bad news, and he was the one who had put his friends in danger.

At the center of it all was the fact that he couldn't figure out why Eerie would take this job in the first place unless Batman asked her to. Red Hood had some resources, but he had no way to repay her for services rendered like the stupid League. The only explanation was that she was there as a spy. Probably to help Batman get Jason "help."

He'd die before he went back to Arkham.

"What are you brooding about?"

Kori's voice interrupted his thoughts, and Jason looked up to see the alien princess in her favorite purple bikini crossing the sand to where he sat in the palm shade. "I'm not brooding," he replied sulkily.

"Your eyebrows are furrowed, your shoulders are hunched, and you're frowning," she said. "Is that not brooding in humans?"

I'm just... I'm having some regrets about bringing Kairos in," Jason admitted.

"Why? So far, it looks to be a good plan. And Eerie is nice. And I like the food she cooks." Eerie had made vegetarian tacos the night before and Kori had eaten five.

"It seemed like a good idea," Jason said, "but I can't figure out why she would take this job unless she's spying on us."

Kori sat down in front of him. "Maybe she likes you." Jason rolled his eyes; that didn't even deserve a response. Kori pushed on. "She seems to like me and Roy, so why not you?"

"Well, I did try to kill her boss and a couple of her friends and the kid she tutors that she must feel some kind of affection for or else why the hell would she keep that job!" Jason was breathing hard.

Kori's odd green eyes bored into his own equally odd green eyes. "You keep bringing up the past as an excuse for the present. You should stop doing that."

Jason had to look away. "Humans don't work like that, Kori."

Kori sighed and started to stand. "Well, if you refuse to work like that, I'd suggest you ask Eerie why she's here."

"Hey, I think I've just about got a field -" Eerie started.

"Why are you here?" Jason coupled the interrogation with his best bat-stare.

Eerie swiveled in the computer chair to face him. "To help you find the Untitled," she answered calmly.

"That's not what I meant."

"I know," she said. There was a long pause while she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Honestly, I was bored. Well, more than bored. Ennui had set in." Another pause. Eerie looked at the floor instead of Jason. "An existential crisis of the alternate identity. Too many nights on the rooftops, too few arrests - you know how it is. But your case has clear cut objectives, and it's something different, a bit of a challenge. I just...I needed a vacation. That doesn't mean I'm not taking this seriously," she added quickly, glancing up at him. "But I really wanted to get out of Gotham for a while."

Jason was pretty sure she was telling the truth. "So Bruce didn't send you?"

"Oh God, no! He wanted to forbid me, but he and I laid out the parameters of our relationship long ago."

Jason snorted. "Yeah, because Bruce is great with boundaries."

"It helps when you're an adult when he first takes you under his wing," Eerie replied. "It's a lot harder in other ways, but not having Bruce as my weird father figure was worth it." She met Jason's eyes. "Bruce does want to know how you are. And he's having me check-in with GPS periodically, but he already knew you guy were camped out here."

Jason wanted to be angry - at Eerie and at Bruce - but he wasn't surprised and actually realized that he had expected this. Instead he said, "Apart from the GPS, what are you going to tell him?"

It was a loaded question, and Jason knew that when he asked it. After Roy's outburst the other morning, Jason had realized that the bats probably treated her with the same distrust he expected if he ever returned to the fold. He even felt a little bad when he saw a sliver of hurt on her face as she said, "I keep my mouth shut."

Jason nodded and tried to lighten the mood his paranoia had dumped on both of them. "Well, if all you want out of this is a vacation, you came to the right place. We've got sun, sand, and plenty of hot young bodies walking around, as long as you're into human men and alien women."

Eerie shrugged. "The island is beautiful, but beach isn't really my thing. At least it's blissfully void of pissy ten-year-olds."

Jason actually laughed. "I hear you're tutoring the Demon Spawn. How does that work?"

"The tutoring part isn't so bad now that I've convinced him that I do know more than him in the areas I'm teaching. It's really everything else that sucks lately." Eerie shook her head and turned back to the computer. "But I'm on vacation and I have made some progress with my vacation mission. I think I've got a few ideas of where to start the fieldwork."

Jason sat down beside her as she pulled up her list, Cherbourg, France at the top. "Where's Cherbourg?" he asked.

"It's a small coastal city in Normandy, across the channel from the UK. It hit on the Justice League's UFO list for multiple shape-shifter sightings, none corroborated. There have also been two murders in the last 15 years where the victim's liver was removed. One was a former mayor's secretary. The other was a detective."

"Sounds like someone has something to hide," said Jason. "Why's it on the top of the list?"

Eerie shrugged. "I think it'll be easiest. Of my top twenty suspected locations, thirteen are small towns where we would be very suspicious. Five others are large cities, including Bludhaven, where narrowing down suspects would be hard. Of the last two, Cherbourg has the most evidence of Untitled presence, so it's at the top of the list."

Jason stared at her. "You've narrowed it down to twenty locations?"

Eerie shrugged again and said, "I'm not as good as Tim, or even Bruce, but I can detective. Besides, this was basic quantitative research methods: what do I want to know, how can I measure it, what tools do I have to measure it, and so on."

Jason snorted. "I forgot how fucking _educated_ you are."

"Well excuse me for my previous life choices," Eerie spat back, clearly offended.

Jason raised his hands defensively. "Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it. There just aren't a whole lot of college graduates in my social circle, and you guys talk weird sometimes."

Her shoulders relaxed. "Yeah, I get that a lot. Part of the reason I went to grad school was to not have to deal with regular people."

"News flash, honey, you're still not dealing with regular people. Regular people don't have work uniforms made of kevlar and masks."

Eerie smiled, and Jason grinned back. "So, let's talk France," he said.

Eerie had kind of expected Jason to want to leave for Cherbourg immediately; him bursting into the computer lab to interrogate her about her motives only confirmed her previous impression that he could be somewhat impetuous. It also confirmed her previous impression that he could be really scary, but he had acted markedly more friendly since airing his worries that she was just Bruce's spy.

Instead, Jason insisted they take a couple of days to prepare. "We're going to need an excuse for wandering around town and talking to people, right?" he had said. "So, we'll go as tourists, and that means booking a hotel and getting a French phrase book and all that shit."

"I know a little French," Eerie had said.

"Bruce made me learn a whole lot of French," Jason answered, "but we'll learn a lot more from people talking if we pretend to know nothing."

Eerie had booked two rooms at a nice Cherbourg hotel for a week on her credit card, so Bruce would know where she was headed next. "We'll pose as two couples traveling together," Jason had said. "I mean, that won't be hard for Roy and Kori, and I'll sleep in the floor if you want." She had shrugged at the time, willing herself to not think about how long it had been since she had slept next to a man, much less a man with muscles like Jason's. _God I hate it when I act like such a teenager,_ she thought as she felt her whole body flush.

But that hadn't felt nearly as awkward as having to tell Jason that she wouldn't be much help in combat situations.

"What do you mean you're not much of a fighter?!" he had almost yelled. "You work with fucking Batman, don't you?"

"Yeah, well, I went heavy on the _detective_ and light on the _crime-fighter_ in my training," she answered huffily. "Fighting is not one of my natural talents, but I do have some self-defense training. It's just more a fight-for-flight kinda thing; my priority is getting away, not putting bad guys down."

Jason had just rolled his eyes and practically dragged her to the training room to send her through virtual combat simulations at increasing levels of difficulty. She managed the first few levels fine - she wasn't completely useless, especially with run-of-the-mill thugs - but later on the challenge became how long she could avoid getting pinned down before Jason went to the next scenario. They were definitely in double digits somewhere before she just flat-out lost, and when the sim shut off, Eerie was embarrassed to see that Roy and Kori had been scrutinizing her performance as well as Jason. At least if her face was red from exertion, they couldn't see her blushing.

The Outlaws talked in quiet tones while Eerie wiped some of the sweat from her face with her cowl. Finally, Jason said, "Well, you're not an asset in a fight, but you're not a liability either. Roy's going to show you how to pilot the ship to free the rest of us up for combat as needed."

Eerie had looked around at their faces, trying to see how they felt about the situation. Roy was grinning broadly; he really loved talking to people about tech stuff. Jason looked, well, not angry. Eerie still found Kori largely unreadable, but all doubts about whether or not the alien princess liked her flew out the window when they went on a pre-undercover shopping trip. "It is so nice to have another girl to try on clothes with!" Kori squealed as she pushed Eerie into a changing room with an armful of expensive items.

While Eerie and Kori made the purchases to make them look like tourists (like suitcases, for starters), Jason and Roy planned their travel. Taking the ship was a necessity; if things went the way they went last time, the Outlaws and their consultant were going to have to make a quick escape to avoid lynching. However, Cherbourg did not feature the kind of skyscrapers that made hiding an alien spaceship easy. Roy ended up rigging an auto-pilot system so he could call the ship to their position when needed and Jason purchased a shipping crate just big enough for the ship near the train station. They would just have to wait for a train to arrive with passengers and jump into the crowd.

Unfortunately, the plan required them to spend the night in the crate, and Eerie was not looking forward to the cramped quarters, even if it was just for a few hours. Roy was fine, but Kori exuded waves of emotion in a way that Eerie found exhausting both as a reader of emotions and as an introvert. And Jason...well, Jason was good at keeping to himself at least, but she didn't like the way she was starting to always know where he was.

It was around 3 in the morning local time when Roy maneuvered the ship into the crate and Jason closed and locked the door behind them. Eerie had just settled in with her laptop to continue her research on the missing livers when Jason grabbed her bags as well as his own and motioned her out the hatch. She followed without saying anything until the ramp closed behind her. "What are we doing?" she asked. "I'm trying to get a little work done."

"I know," said Jason, "but Kori is about to be bored, and when Kori gets bored, she and Roy go at it. I figured, if they're in the ship, there's at least two sets of walls to dampen the sound." He almost looked embarrassed.

"Oh," Eerie said. She had honestly been trying very hard to not look the connections between Roy and Kori.

Jason spread out a sleeping bag and set up a small lamp. "This thing has a outlet, if you need more juice for the computer," he said, gesturing to it as he lay down. "And there's another sleeping bag in my suitcase if you want it."

She dug it out and, after folding it a few times, sat down with her back against the side of the crate and her laptop in front of her. Less than a minute later, the noises started.

"Oh God," said Eerie, "are they always that loud?"

"Unfortunately," answered Jason without moving. "Roy made sure to put you in a room far from theirs while we were on the island, but you'll just have to deal with it while we're here." He sounded a little defensive, and Eerie could see the line that connected him to the two lovers swell and shine.

"It's fine," she said quickly. "I'm glad they're enjoying themselves."

She dove into her research and completely lost herself in sorting through various news reports and official documentation of the killings they were here to investigate. Along the way, she had assumed that Jason had fallen asleep; his breathing was deep and steady, and she hated that she had noticed. Which meant that she almost jumped out of her skin when, after a half an hour of silence on his part, Jason said, "What are you working on?"

After a couple of deep breaths, Eerie answered. "I've been going over everything I can find about these missing liver victims, trying to find a suspect."

"And?"

Eerie sat up from where she had been hunched over the computer, and her back cracked audibly. "The first victim was the mayor's secretary. That particular mayor, Daniel Jouanne, remained in office for a few more years, then retired to a life of giving speeches, attending dinner parties, and advising younger politicians and civil servants."

"Sounds like that could be our guy."

"Yeah, except that Jouanne went missing four years ago, presumed drowned during his semi-weekly swim in the Channel. The second missing liver victim was Pierre Valarde, the detective who continued to look into the case."

"Was this Jouanne guy ever under suspicion for the secretary's murder?"

"There isn't a single word from the press or the police files to suggest that."

"That's really suspicious."

"I agree. So maybe the Untitled was Jouanne for a while, but then Jouanne got old. So it faked Jouanne death and took on a new identity, which then killed Valarde."

Eerie waited for Jason to say something. The little lamp did not give enough light to read his features by, especially with the domino mask; they had agreed to stay in uniform in case someone stumbled upon their crate. At least, Jason and Eerie had stayed in uniform...

Finally, Jason said, "Since it was a detective that was killed, I think we should start poking around the police department first. Any ideas for how we can do that?"

Eerie thought for a second. "It'll depend on the building; I've done some daytime surveillance from air vents before, but I don't really know what to expect here." She thought for another second. "The other option would be to go in as civilians. Since Wayne Enterprises has started this Batman Inc. initiative, I'm sure Mr. Wayne's personal assistant could find some reason for needing to research the law enforcement tactics used in rural France."

Jason snorted. "I thought you wanted to get away from being Bruce's fucking gopher."

"Yeah, well, if it'll get us in the building..."

Jason let the silence stretch again, then said, "What are the limitations of your powers? Like, where would you need to be to see if something is wrong with somebody?"

"I have to be able to see them even if it's just with binoculars. It helps to be in ear-shot, too, but it's not necessary."

"So we will have to get in the building."

"Yeah."

Another silence. Eerie started to go back to the computer to pull up the Cherbourg police roster when Jason asked another question. "Why do you have to be able to see them?"

"I don't really know," she answered kind of absentmindedly as she searched for the roster. "I think that I can kind of sense the emotions and relationships around me, but being able to see a person brings _their_ relationships into focus."

She had found the roster and was looking over it when Jason said, "It sounds kinda shitty."

"Hm?"

"Your powers. It sounds kinda shitty having to deal with everybody else's drama all the time. Having to see how people feel about you all the time."

"I'm spared that at least. I can't see how anybody feels about me."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I have to do it the old fashion way where I have to look at body language and what people actually say. Sometimes, I have to ask a friend to call another friend while I'm on the third line being really quiet and the first friend gets the second friend to talk about me..."

"Somebody has been watching too much _Mean Girls_."

"Maybe, but I have thought about trying it."

"You could get Dickie-bird to be your mole since you guys are like BFFs."

"No thanks. I love the guy, but he attracts drama."

Jason went silent again, then said, "You should try to get a little sleep. Staring at the screen too long with rot your eyeballs out."

Eerie took his advise - her eyes were starting to burn - and spread the sleeping bag on on the floor a couple of feet from his. She listened to his steady breathing until hers matched it as she drifted off.


	6. Chapter 6

The trip from the train station to the hotel went smoothly, as did check-in. The hologram device that Roy rigged up for Kori worked perfectly, and no one gave any of them a second glance. Jason was glad for that; since they weren't really sure what their plan was yet, the longer they could go without making any kind of impression the better.

The two rooms were across the hall from each other, and Roy shut the door behind him and Kori after muttering something about taking a nap. Jason didn't mind. Until he and Eerie had some idea of what they were looking for, Roy and Kori were free to do whatever they wanted. He tossed his bag into a corner of the room he and Eerie would share as he looked around. Big bed, desk with comfy chair, small sofa, large glass doors with a balcony. Eerie had even managed to snag them rooms on the top floor, so they had easy access for mask work. It would do just fine.

Eerie had already managed to pull out her laptop and was sitting cross-legged on the bed with it in front of her. Jason flopped down on the bed next to her and said, "You never take a break, do you?"

"Sure I do," she answered without looking up from the screen, "but only after I have some results."

"You take this whole consultant thing really seriously," he said, pulling the screen over so he could see what she was looking at. Police roster, with ranks and start dates.

"Well, you take this seriously, so I think I should too."

"You're not having second thoughts the closer we get to killing someone?"

"No," she said without hesitation, looking straight at him. "First of all, according to all the information you've given me so far, we won't be killing a person. Second, I trust you to keep your word."

Jason found himself quickly looking back down at the screen, even going so far as to scroll through the list a little. He hadn't often had anyone say that they trusted him, much less one of the bats. It was a little overwhelming, and he needed to get her eyes off him. "Any thoughts on this roster?"

She pulled up another document on the screen, this one with a man's photo along with his stats. "I figured the logical place to start is with some of the higher-ups. This guy, Paul LeRoi, is the equivalent of the commissioner, and he took his position right after Valarde's death, so I think that makes him worth checking out. But really," she continued as she pulled up another list, also with photos, "it would be worth getting eyes on all eleven of these ranking officers."

Jason nodded. "It's a place to start," he said. "Tonight let's scout of the police building, see if you'll be able to get in there for daytime surveillance or if we'll need to plan something else." Suddenly his stomach growled audibly. "I need some food. You hungry?"

"Yeah, but can you just bring me something back? I want to keep working on this for a little while longer." Eerie smiled sheepishly.

Jason just rolled his eyes and left her to her work.

When he came back an hour later with falafel and curry, Eerie was curled up on one side of the bed, asleep. Jason took this chance to peruse the files she had left open as he ate his curry; he assumed that if she hadn't wanted him to look at them, she wouldn't have left them out in the open like this. The police roster and list of ranking officers was still open, but Eerie had also started constructing what Jason could only think of as a virtual case wall. The photos of the officers along with their names, ranks, dates of commission, dates of signing up with the force, etc, were arranged on a white background, and Jason found that he could zoom in and out as well as drag the different bits of information around. When he put things back the way Eerie had them, he could see that they were arranged in chronological order with a big red dot indicating Valarde's murder.

Jason was good at a number of skills needed in the vigilante business. He could intimidate. He could acquire information through coercion and force. He could send the occasional strongly worded message and he could take down bad guys like nobody's business. He could be patient, sitting all night on one ledge waiting for his target. But the detective stuff had never been his strong suit, and he admired Eerie's systematic study of the problem at hand. The way things were looking, they weren't going to need these rooms for more than the week they had booked them, if that long. He had felt less concerned about bringing Eerie in since their confrontation in the computer lab, but now he was actually feeling good. Maybe she was useless in a fight, but she had the right kind of mind for this kind of work.

Soon, the Untitled would be long fucking gone. Then maybe he could breathe again.

As he flopped on his side of the bed again, he let that thought lull him to sleep.

After night fell, Red Hood ordered Starfire to cover them from above as he, Kairos, and Arsenal made their way across the roof tops. "We're not expecting any trouble," he explained, "but let's make sure we see it coming from a mile away if it's there."

It was good to be out in the open night again, and Kairos felt some of her discomfort at being in cramped quarters fade as she swung to the top of police headquarters, Red Hood in front of her and Arsenal following. She started looking for vents that would suggest a system of heating and cooling ducts inside while Arsenal pulled out one of his gizmos. "Looks like we've got two individuals inside," he said, looking at the heat signatures coming from below them. "First floor."

"Good," said Red Hood as Kairos continued to prowl around. "We can go in a window if we have to."

"We won't," Kairos called softly. She had found a good sized vent toward the back of the building and pulled a small multipurpose tool from her belt to remove the screws holding it on, but Red Hood brushed her aside when it came time to actually pull the heavy piece of metal from its place. She would have been insulted - she could have done it herself given enough time - but it was faster and easier to just let him do it.

Kairos took off her cape and hood and ran her hands around her belt, looking for anything loose that might snag. "Do you want me to come in with you?" asked Red Hood. She just stared at him; shoulders that broad were not meant to travel in air vents. "Well fuck you too," he said good-naturedly and handed her a comm to hook on her ear. "Keep in contact at all times," he said. "We'll alert you if the guys in there move."

She nodded and hoisted herself into the vent, opting to slide down the vertical shaft feet first. It was about six feet deep, just enough that she had a little drop at the end, but otherwise, these ducts were perfect for her needs, wide with lots of vents for observation. She chose a direction at random. "Arsenal?" she said over the comm.

"Yep?"

"Can you follow my movements, maybe make a map?"

"Sure thing, I'll start tracking you. You just holler if you want me to put a marker somewhere."

This was going to be pie. She paused at each of the vents to see what she could see, using the binocular settings in her lenses to read the name plates on each desk, and instructing Arsenal to put markers when she could see names from her list of officers, most of which were on the third floor. She moved down to the second floor with another brief drop - she'd have to be careful about the noise when she came back during the day - where she found her primary goal, the commissioner's office. Conveniently, a vent ran right across the back of the room, so she'd be able to see all his visitors. It was like they had set the place up for surveillance.

After an hour and a half of exploring the vents (during which time the two figures on the first floor never moved), Kairos emerged from the roof vent again. "This is going to be pie," she said to Red Hood as he helped her out.

He didn't look as optimistic, but she guessed it was his job to take everything seriously. "There's not enough cover around here to come back during daylight, so we'll need to be here before sun-up. You wanna just wait here until people start coming in?"

"I need a few things from the hotel first, but we could come back just before sun-up."

Red Hood nodded and conveyed their plans to Starfire as they crossed the mile of rooftops back to the hotel. "See anything suspicious?" Hood asked when the alien princess landed on the roof with them.

"Nothing but stars and city lights," she answered pleasantly. "The air is much cleaner here than in the other cities where I've been."

Kairos heard Arsenal say something about manufacturing as she dropped down on the balcony of her room. She began digging in the false bottom of her suitcase for supplies, mainly the urine collection bag that strapped to her lower leg covered by her boot. It was unpleasant, but necessary for any surveillance of longer than a couple of hours since letting herself get dehydrated could have even worse consequences. She also found the water bladder that attached to the back of her suit and double checked the energy bars she usually kept in her belt. She filled the water bladder and made sure water came through the tube...and realized that everything was in order and sun-up wouldn't be for another four hours. She turned back to the urine bag to look it over again.

"You should take another nap," said Red Hood from behind her. She jumped and turned to see that Jason had stripped to the waist, including the domino mask under his helmet. "We got plenty of time, and if I have to watch you keep checking your equipment, I'll shoot you to put you out of your fucking misery."

"Sorry," she said automatically. "Just, I dunno, excited."

"Like a kid at Christmas, I'd say." Eerie pulled off her own mask and grinned at him. He grinned back, and she felt herself blush a little. Jason continued, "But I thought you were tired of sitting around just watching people."

"No, I'm tired of watching _mobsters_. Trying to pick the one that doesn't belong is a bit more fun." She paused. "Also, I like crawling through air vents. It makes me feel like a secret agent." She could tell the adrenaline was going to her head; she never would have said something like that a few days ago.

Jason rolled his eyes at her and wandered off toward the bathroom. "I'm gonna take a shower, and when I get back, you better not be checking your equipment again."

Eerie waited until she heard the water running to strip her uniform and put on sweats and a tee. Jason was right; with the jet lag, another nap would be beneficial, no matter how much her brain was buzzing. She sent a quick check-in message to the Batcave, set an alarm for two hours later, and lay down on the bed. Focusing on her breathing, she pushed her busy mind gently toward a quieter place and was only vaguely aware when Jason got out of the shower and occupied his half of the bed. Her last thought before succumbing to sleep was to reflect that he had never even asked if it was okay to share the bed.


	7. Chapter 7

"So?" Jason said as soon as Kairos dropped down on the balcony just as the sky got dark the following evening.

"Can you at least let me empty my urine bag first?" she said, walking straight to the bathroom.

Jason grimaced and followed. "Urine bag?" Sure enough, Kairos pulled off her left boot and from the leg of her suit removed a plastic bag full of yellow liquid.

"How else do you think I stayed in those air vents for ten hours?" she asked as she began emptying the liquid into the toilet.

"That's commitment."

She smiled a little but didn't look at him, concentrating on the task at hand. "Batman always said commitment was training for two hours every morning before work."

"Batman needs to pull his head out of his ass," Jason said without hesitation. "Okay, the urine bag is empty. What did you find out?"

"Geez, can't I change first?"

Jason growled and stalked out of the bathroom and around the room until Eerie came back out in civvies. "I got you some food," he said, gesturing toward a stack of take-out boxes. She looked in each of the boxes before selecting the croque monsieur with fries. Then she plopped down on the bed, opened her laptop and inserted a small card in the side. After a few seconds of watching the footage that started playing, Jason realized that this was the feed from her mask and cowl. "You talk to yourself while you watch people?"

"It's easier than trying to write it all down," she said, chewing on a bite of sandwich, "and this way, I have faces to put with everything instead of having to know or remember everybody's names."

"So what did you find?"

"I don't think our guy is in law enforcement," she said, scrolling through the footage with the audio muted. "All these folks seem to be normal. I mean, as normal as cops ever are." Jason felt his face fall. Back to square one. "But," Eerie continued, apparently finding the moment in the footage she was looking for, "this guy is most certainly weird."

Jason watched the video. He recognized the commissioner from the photos Eerie had show him earlier, but the guy across the desk was a mystery. "Who is he?"

"Deputy Mayor Rene Georges. Apparently this meeting happens every day."

"Why would the deputy mayor meet with the commissioner every day?"

"Exactly," Eerie said through a mouthful of fries. "This guy is full of bad vibes. He stopped to talk to a few of the officers on his way out, and each and everyone of them exuded the same sense of, well, devotion, even when they were just exchanging pleasantries."

_Bingo_, thought Jason. He got up and started pulling out his guns from their various hiding places.

"What are you doing?" asked Eerie.

"I'm going to pay Monsieur Georges a visit."

"No you're not."

Jason spun around and glared at her. "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?"

"Someone you made a deal with," she answered in a level tone, but he could see her hands tremble slightly. He was scaring her, but he wasn't sure if she was scared of him hurting her or if she was scared of him killing someone. She was right about the deal though; he had given his word not to kill anyone until she gave the go-ahead. He sneered. "Fine, then I am going out to find something that will get me drunk while you research all your stupid fucking shit!"

He made a point of slamming the door behind him as he stormed out, though he immediately regretted it. It did not fit with the low profile of two happy tourist couples they were trying to maintain. By the time he finished his first whiskey at the first bar he found, he regretted a lot more. Sure, Eerie was being kind of a whiny bat bitch, but she was trying to do the job right. And while he felt it in his bones that the deputy mayor was an evil piece of shit, it was possible what Eerie had seen was the result of the guy being well-liked. Giving her a couple more days to guarantee who the target was wouldn't hurt anything. Jason could be patient.

After his second whiskey, Jason realized that he also didn't like the idea that Eerie was scared of him. Sure, he had a temper and, sure, he'd tried to kill bats in the past, but that was long time ago, and besides, he'd never really hurt a member of his own team. Not that they were a team.

He paid his bill at the end of the third whiskey and decided to head back to the hotel with a peace offering. Whiskey, he had found, could smooth over any number of misunderstandings, and he exited the convenience mart with a terribly expensive fifth of bourbon - American liquor was like gold here but he didn't know anything about the local brands. When he got back to the hotel room, Eerie was exactly where he expected her to be: sitting on the bed in front of her computer. She jumped a little when he came in. "Look," he said before she could make a sound, handing her the bottle, "I was an ass, so I brought you this." He had never been good at apologies, and he'd drunk enough not to be _drunk_ per se, but a little fuzzy around the edges.

Eerie tentatively took the offering and pulled off the brown bag. "How did you know I like bourbon?" she asked, looking at the bottle.

"I didn't," he said, "but you work all the fucking time and you need to lighten up."

"I'm not sure you're the right person to be giving lectures about being obsessed with work," she said, "but I have a policy about never looking gift bourbon in the mouth." She unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. Jason was relieved; halfway home he had remembered that most girls he'd seen drink hard liquor insisted on mixing it with Coke or some shit, but Eerie didn't seem to mind it straight. She didn't even make a face. She screwed the lid back on and shifted the laptop so he could see the screen. "I've been looking into Georges..." she began.

"No," said Jason, "no work. Tonight, we drink." He shut the laptop and put the bottle back in her hands. She looked confused. "God," said Jason, "can we please just fucking drink? We're friends, right? Friends drink together, right?"

He really didn't want to explain that he felt guilty about his outburst, that he really did want them to be friends. Luckily, Eerie didn't question further, taking another drink from the bottle, but she pulled it away when he reached for it. "You look like you're a few ahead of me," she said. "You have to let me catch up."

"I've merely taken into account our differences in weight and alcohol tolerance," Jason said, stretching to grab the bottle.

A couple hours later the bottle was missing over half its contents and Eerie was giggling uncontrollably as Jason told her about his former fighting mentor who was addicted to energy drinks. "And then he puked hot pink all over the car!" Jason concluded as Eerie laughed a silent, body-wracking laugh that mimicked sobs. "That dumb fucker needed that shit so bad, he didn't even realize that I had poisoned it," he said, then mentally smacked himself; talking about killing people always made bats mad. Eerie, however, was perhaps too drunk to notice his slip, as she continued her giggle fit. When she calmed down, she lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, hands grabbing at her short hair.

"What did he do?" she asked.

Shit. She had noticed.

"Human trafficking. Child prostitution."

"Oh."

That was not the reaction he was used to getting. He braced himself for the lecture that always came, but Eerie just lay there scrunching her fingers in her hair, probably silently judging him. "What the hell is your problem?!" he spat.

She rolled over to look at him, confusion all over her face. "What did I do?"

"I'd rather have the stupid ass lecture than all this silent judgment bullshit."

"I'm not judging," she said plainly.

"Well why the fuck not?!" She was pissing him off, fucking with the rules.

She sat up, swaying just a little and closing her eyes like she was having to think hard about finding the words. "Batman espouses ideals that culturally we deem 'noble' or 'good' or 'just'." Jason could almost hear the scare quotes in her voice; she was definitely using her I-have-a-college-degree voice. "We validate Batman's choices by telling ourselves that the means are just as important as the ends, that if we wanted a good democratic society then we have to rely on the democratic institutions in place. And I agree to a certain extent. But I also think that the culture that tells us that Batman's choices are 'right' is fundamentally flawed. It is sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and a whole slew of other things." She opened her eyes and looked at him. "Simply put, Batman will never know what it is like to be a woman in the world. He will never experience the fear of going about everyday life that women sometimes do." She paused and looked away again. "I mean, this is just one thing among many; Bruce may have tried to give himself a full range of experiences, but he will never be black or gay or poor. And for these reasons, I'm not sure that I like that he has the authority to say what is 'right' all the time." She paused again, then searched around the bed for the bottle. "I can't believe I just said that," she said before taking a drink.

"Yeah, you're getting real fucking confessional," said Jason. But what she had said made sense; even in his days as Robin, he had chafed under Bruce's protection of criminals, in part because Bruce seem so far removed from the damage that the drug dealers and pimps did. He could talk about seeing the worst of Gotham, but it didn't really mean anything until you had lived it. His mind flashed to his mother with a needle in her arm, but he quickly pushed that away. Eerie nudged the bottle at him and said, "You're turn."

"Hm?"

"You're turn to confess something. And don't just tell me about something bad you did; you have to say something you're scared to say."

"The fuck I do!"

"Friends, right?" she said, waving the bottle in front of his face.

Jason glared but took the bottle. He thought for a second. "I...I regret going after the Robins," he said quickly and took a long drink. "It was a waste of my time," he finished, trying to maintain some sense of bravado. It didn't seem to matter; the next thing he knew, Eerie was on top of him, pressing her lips to his. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and he found himself pushing back, dropping the bottle to grab her waist. _Too long without_, he thought as he felt a pressure in his nethers, and ignoring the question of what exactly was going on or why, he resigned himself to an entirely pleasant fuck with a rather attractive girl.

Until Eerie suddenly broke off the kiss and pushed away from him. "Fuck!" she said repeatedly as she pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her face against them.

Jason jumped up off the bed. "What the hell did I do?!" he almost shouted.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm just...fuck...I just don't do casual sex and I don't know what this means and I've fucked it all up and I'm so sorry I'm such a fucking idiot and I don't know what the fuck I was thinking fuck fuck fuck now I'm having a fucking panic attack." Eerie had started pressing her body even tighter into her knees as she said this.

Jason took a deep breath. The rest of it he had no idea about, but a panic attack was something he could handle. He sat back down on the bed and said, "Okay, take a deep breath in...now let it out slowly...deep breath in...now let it out..." Over and over he repeated until Eerie stopped looking like she was trying to keep her body together by sheer force of will.

After about ten minutes, she looked up from her knees but still faced away from Jason. "Thanks," she said in a small voice.

"I saved Roy from mercenaries. It's nothing." He paused. "Do they happen often? The panic attacks?"

"Usually not, as long as I take my meds."

"And have you been taking them?" The last thing he needed was her projecting weird emotional shit everywhere.

"Yes."

"Good," he said, feeling like a nurse maid. "It's time to go to sleep." He went to the bathroom and threw some water on his face after taking a piss. _Holy shit,_ he thought. _What a nightmare_. Some part of him, the part that was convinced he was a completely unredeemable fuck-up, felt completely validated that kissing him had given a girl a panic attack. The rest of him was just tired, too tired to think about the whole mess tonight.

When he came back out, he was relieved to find Eerie in the bed, curled up facing away from him. He self-consciously settled himself on the small sofa with his jacket as a blanket.


	8. Chapter 8

When Jason knocked on Roy and Kori's door the next morning, he wasn't the most hungover he'd been, but he wasn't feeling great either. More than anything he wanted to not be around when Eerie woke up; he was so not ready to deal with what had happened.

"Kori!" Jason heard Roy yell. "You can't answer the door like that!" Jason couldn't help but smirk a little when Roy cracked the door to peer out, obviously only wearing his boxers. "Something up?" he asked.

"I'm going out for food," said Jason. "You should check in on Eerie while I'm gone."

"What happened?" Roy was instantly serious, no longer hiding behind the door. "You should have told us something went wrong..."

"Nothing went wrong," Jason interrupted. "We just got shitfaced last night, and I don't know how she's gonna feel this morning. So you can go and wake her up and work your hangover magic, and Kori and I will go get some hangover food."

"Yes!" Kori called from behind the door. "I would like to go out!"

Roy grimaced. Jason knew he didn't like dealing with the fallout of other people's debauchery, but he had taken care of Jason enough times for Jason to know he was good at making hangovers go away. And Jason really couldn't deal right now. "Please, Roy?" he said, hoping his desperation wasn't showing.

Roy's eyes widened. Jason groaned internally. Roy stepped out in the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. "Something happened last night," he said. "What did you do?"

Jason rolled his eyes. "Nothing happened. We got drunk and talked shit about the bats."

"That's practically foreplay for you," said Roy. "You fucked her and now your regret it and you're sending me in there to clean up your mess."

"That did not happen. I'm just too hungover to handle getting puked on."

Roy stared at him dubiously. "Whatever, Todd," he finally said. "Let me put some pants on."

Kori pranced out of the room as Roy stalked back in. Roy had lectured her about the importance of selecting one look on the hologram device for the duration of their stay so as not to attract attention, but though she had kept the same dark brown skin and hair, her hairstyle and nail color changed multiple times a day. After giving her a quick once-over to make sure she hadn't chosen anything too drastic, Jason started down the hall.

Outside, Kori hummed a little under her breath as she peered around eagerly. Her good mood rubbed up against Jason's shitty one in the worst way possible, and he walked as quickly as possible toward the center of town. "For someone who spent so many years hiding from humans, you seem awful happy to be around so many of them," he said snidely.

Kori didn't rise to his baiting. "I hid from humans because some of them wanted to kill or enslave me. That doesn't mean I don't like visiting them occasionally."

Jason just huffed and walked faster. Kori, of course, didn't even look like she was working to keep up with him. After a few minutes of silence, Kori said, "I heard what Roy said earlier, that something happened between you and Eerie. Is it true?"

Jason actually growled. "I don't want to talk about it."

"I have said many times that you humans could avoid a great deal of pain and misunderstanding if you would stop being so embarrassed about having emotions," said Kori.

"Yeah, well, a significant number of humans that you've been around were raised by Batman, so stunted emotional development is pretty par of the course."

"That may be so," Kori continued, "but compared to my people, all humans are stunted."

"What's your point, Kori?"

"My point is that you usually only get this agitated when you're confronted with an emotion you aren't comfortable with."

"I said that I don't want to talk about it," Jason answered.

Roy knocked gently at the door to Jason and Eerie's room and, not hearing any sounds of life, let himself in. Eerie was sprawled in the bed, face pressed into a pillow at an impossible angle. Before waking her, Roy retrieved the trash can from the bathroom, just in case, then he crept up to the bed and shook her shoulder. She awoke quickly, if groggily. "Waz hap'nin'?" she said.

"Just wanted to see how you're feeling," said Roy.

Eerie groaned and pulled the blankets over her head. "Hungover."

"That's what Jason said. What kinda hungover are you? Gonna hurl?"

"I've never been a pukey drunk," she answered, "but I seriously need some water."

Roy was slightly relieved; so maybe he had made some mistakes, but he did not consider it his cosmic recompense to deal with other people's vomit. He retrieved a glass of water from the bathroom and sat it on the bedside table, then surveyed the room. If there was anything left of the bottle from last night, Jason had disposed of it. Jason was weird like that; he'd drag Roy into a bar for recon, but never left alcohol out where Roy might find it. Roy liked to think it was a sign of Jason actually caring for him, but it could also be that he needed to depend on him as a partner. When Roy looked back down, Eerie was still hiding under the covers, but the glass of water was drained. He refilled it in the bathroom and returned. "So what happened last night?" he asked.

Eerie actually sat up in the bed and took the glass from him this time. "I came in from my recon with a new lead. Jason wanted to run off and nail the guy immediately, but we have a deal, and I'm not sure this is the guy yet. Jason had an angry moment and stormed out. When he came back after having some drinks somewhere, he brought a bottle of whiskey as a peace offering." Eerie downed the second glass of water.

"And that's it?" Roy pressed as he took the glass again.

"Yeah, there were some drunken stories, but that was about it." She groaned. "I didn't take my meds last night." Eerie got out of bed and started digging in one of her bags. Roy refilled the water glass yet again, and when he got back Eerie had a number of bottles spread out in front of her. "Wow," he said. "You've got a mini pharmacy."

"Yeah, well, I've got my no anxiety pills, and my no allergy pills, and now my no hangover headache pills."

Roy made a noncommittal noise, handing her the glass of water. "So you guys just drank and told stories?"

Eerie finished taking her pills, but she looked flustered to Roy. "Why are you being so nosy?"

"Nothing," he said. "It's just that Jason was acting kinda funny this morning." His phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out. "Speak of the devil, Jason wants to know what kind of hangover food you want."

"Fat and protein, with as much grease as possible," Eerie answered as she collapsed back onto the bed with a groan. "What do you mean that Jason was acting funny?"

Roy sent a reply text to Jason and sat down on the half of the bed Eerie wasn't sprawled on, grinning broadly. "Is this one of those high school does-he-like-me-or-not questions? Because if it is, you have to braid my hair."

"Fuck off, Harper," Eerie growled, pulling the covers back over her head. Roy grinned even wider; she sounded a lot like Jason.

"So you guys fucked," he continued. "It's not a big deal..."

"That did not happen."

"Well you're both acting like something did."

Eerie uncovered her head but still didn't look in Roy's direction. "I had a panic attack last night."

"Oh," said Roy. Well that made sense; she was embarrassed about showing weakness in front of Jason, and Jason was probably being awkward because having to deal with someone else's panic attack just reminded him of his whole slew of mental health issues. "Jason wasn't an ass about it, was he?"

"No, he was fine," she said quickly. "I'm just super awkward and now very hungover and would really like to crawl in a hole for a while." The covers went back over her head.

"It's not a big deal," Roy said. "We've all got our problems -"

"Roy," Eerie cut him off, "I appreciate what you're trying to do, but I think I'd rather be alone right now."

Roy shrugged even though she couldn't see it and got up off the bed. "Sure thing, just be sure to drink some more water. Holler if you need anything."

When Eerie woke up again, the pressure in her head had subsided somewhat, but all of her joints still ached. The amount of light in the room suggested that it was early afternoon, but that wasn't what had woken her up; her phone had beeped from the bedside table, where she found another glass of water and a take-out container of eggs covered in cheese and half a baguette. She groaned a little when she saw it. It was perfect hangover food, but it had also probably been put there by Jason and a whole new wave of shame washed over her when she thought about him. _What the hell was I thinking?!_ _Also, since when do I get drunk and randomly make-out with people?_

She checked the phone. A text from Dick: _You dead yet?_ Of course, Dick would know if something was really wrong because Bruce would tell him he hadn't heard from her. This was Dick's way of making sure everything was going smoothly and/or being nosy.

Eerie wrote back, _No, but I wish I was_, before picking up the container of eggs. She couldn't decide if her stomach felt that way because it was hungry or because she wanted to throw up. Tentatively, she took a bite of the eggs and decided it was hunger, but she had only just put the second bite in her mouth when the phone started ringing. She answered with a fully mouth. "Hello?"

"Call me Mandy if you aren't where you can speak freely," said Dick seriously.

Eerie swallowed and said, "What?"

"Call me Mandy, like Bruce's receptionist, if you are in a position where you cannot speak freely," Dick repeated.

"Why would I be in a situation where I couldn't speak freely?"

"Why do you wish you were dead?"

"I'm hungover! Geez, Dick, what did you think was happening?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "I was worried Jason had done something…" Dick trailed off. "Why are you hungover?"

"Jason threw a tantrum last night because I wouldn't let him kill this guy, and he apologized with a bottle of whiskey."

"You're letting him kill people?!"

"Not until I determine they're evil shape-shifting demon-type things."

"Oh." Another pause. "So everything is going okay?"

"Yeah, I guess," Eerie said as she rubbed a hand down her face. She could tell Dick about what happened last night. Talking through it with someone would be good for her, but first of all, Dick wasn't great with relationships and, second, she was not ready to deal with the Dick-drama fall-out of admitting she had the hots for Jason fucking Todd. She groaned inwardly as soon as she realized she had actually thought the phrase "the hots." She kept talking to try to allay Dick's suspicions. "We're in France, I've been doing recon work, and I think we've almost got our guy."

"Well, that's good," said Dick. "You sure everything's okay?"

"What makes you think it's not okay?"

"I dunno, we just haven't heard from you, apart from your GPS pings."

"I didn't realize you were expecting phone calls every other day."

"Hey, don't get sassy with me," said Dick evenly. "It's just that usually you only get this withdrawn and secretive when you're dealing with something, that's all."

Busted. It was true; she almost always stopped talking to people and withdrew into work when she was trying to figure out her own emotional life. It was the characteristic that she and Bruce shared, the one that annoyed Dick to know end.

Dick interpreted her silence for what it was, assent, and continued, "I don't know what's bothering you, and I'm not expecting you to talk about it right now, but when you're ready to, I'm here, okay? Doesn't matter what it is. We're friends; we deal with each other's shit, right?"

"Yeah, Dick," Eerie answered after swallowing the ball of emotion that started rising up her throat. As much as she complained about Dick-drama, it had always been a two-way street, like the time her grad school boyfriend had dumped her for taking a job at Wayne Enterprises and becoming a corporate stooge. (Dick had helped her egg his car.) She wanted to just blurt out what had happened; she could already imagine how, in a couple of years, they would have a big laugh about the time she got drunk and kissed Jason Todd. But talking about what had happened would mean talking about what Jason was like now, and that would mean telling things about him that weren't hers to tell. She kept her mouth shut. "I need to drink some more water and get some food in my stomach," she said finally.

"Alright," said Dick, "take care, and call if you need me."

Eerie's stomach was in knots after the conversation, and she decided to take a shower before finishing the eggs. An hour later, dressed, fed, less achy, and with some modicum of her dignity, she knocked on Roy and Kori's door.


	9. Chapter 9

**AN: So, this story got dropped for a while, but the reviews pulled me back in, and I'm determined to finish what I started. So here's a new chapter, and I'm going to have weekly updates to keep me moving. I hope you enjoy!**

Once Eerie had joined them, it didn't take long for the team to outline the game plan for that night: Eerie wanted to take a look at Georges's office to determine the parameters of another daytime stakeout. Jason still felt a little annoyed that she wouldn't let him just kill the guy already, but it was only for a moment. Besides, he had other things on his mind. He looked her over as she and Roy talked through improvements to the thermal mapping system they'd used at the police station; she was a little pale, but she handled her hangover with dignity.

She was definitely avoiding his eyes, though, which meant she hadn't been drunk enough to forget what had happened. Jason was fine with just never talking about it again and he really hoped she felt the same way.

It wasn't that he had anything against hooking up with her; the way his body had reacted the previous night definitely demonstrated that he found her attractive. But she'd said she didn't "do casual sex," and Jason wasn't sure what that meant but he guessed she wanted more than one fun night. And Jason hadn't done more than one fun night in a very long time. There had been that thing with the flight attendant, but it had really only illustrated that his life was too complicated for, well, anything.

Then he noticed Kori watching him watch Eerie and quickly scowled at his boots. The last thing he needed was Kori giving him another lecture about how humans should be more like Tamaraneans. He had tried the whole "follow your feelings" thing before and it had taken him to a bad place. He could at least admit to himself that his feelings weren't always great for following.

Eerie and Roy finished talking about whatever bullshit it was that needed discussing, and Roy looked over to Jason and said, "That sound good to you, Jay?"

Jason broke off his scowling and said, "Yeah, fine. Everything good to go, then?" Each member of the team nodded. "Good, we'll leave when it gets dark." He stalked toward the door. "I'm gonna take a shower."

The warm water relaxed his shoulder muscles a bit, but Jason couldn't shake the tighter-than-a-bowstring feeling. He let the water pour over his head and down his face as he leaned against the wall of the tiny stall. It was a little claustrophobic and Jason didn't usually stay very long, but today it offered a privacy that was unlikely to be disturbed by nosy or sexually aggressive teammates.

Jason snorted a little at the image of Roy bursting in, wanting Jason to either talk or fuck.

The room was still empty when Jason came out, and he rooted around in the various to-go containers until he found something appetizing. The headache he had woken up with had intensified during his hours with Roy and Kori, but the shower had eased it to a manageable level. Even better, he spied some painkillers in the pile of stuff surrounding Eerie's suitcase and helped himself to some, noticing exactly how many different bottles of pills she had scattered around. He checked the labels, filing the names away for future reference. Really, the panic attack last night shouldn't have surprised him; after all, it was her anxiety disorder that had outed her to Batman in the first place, and traveling often exacerbated anxiety.

Jason shook his head; he was playing nursemaid again.

There were still a few hours until nightfall. He paced around the room for a minute before digging a well-worn paperback of _Moby Dick _out of his bag and settling down with it. Crazy Captain Ahab had always reminded him of Bruce.

It hadn't taken Kairos more than an hour to get a feel for the vents in the municipal building and since she had Georges's address, she suggested they scope out his home while they were out. Red Hood, who was definitely avoiding her (and who could blame him), seemed to like the idea, so she and Arsenal were perched on the roof of a house across the street peering in the windows while Red Hood and Starfire scouted around.

There were plenty of lights still on in Georges home, but Kairos had yet to get eyes on the occupants. "I'm moving to the house on the left," she said quietly and Arsenal nodded his assent. Grappling hooks were next to useless in residential areas, so she climbed down, skirted through the shadows of the street lights, and climbed on top of the abode of Georges's closest neighbor, Arsenal behind her. From the side, she could see into what looked like an office, and after a few minutes, Georges came into the room with a tumbler of amber liquid and sat down at the desk.

Kairos settled in to pick through the threads. Georges had a lot of them, the most immediate of which was to his wife, who was in the nearby bedroom. It obviously wasn't a relationship with a whole lot of love on his part, but that wasn't necessarily surprising. She started looking at another thread, the one connected to the mayor, but she didn't sense any strong feelings there either. She started moving farther out, picking a thread, looking it over, then picking another one. She wasn't really sure how long she had been sitting there in silence when Arsenal said, "So you and Jason are totally not acting weird around each other."

"We're in the field," she answered without looking up.

Arsenal huffed. "Fine, you and Red Hood are totally not acting weird."

"We're both just focused on the job."

"Yeah, sure, nothing at all happened last night."

"I told you, I had a panic attack." Kairos was starting to get annoyed; Georges had almost finished his drink and could leave the office at any moment, and she still wasn't quite sure what was going on here.

"If it was just a panic attack, Red would be here keeping an eye on you instead of ordering me to do it. Both of you are avoiding being alone together like the plague."

"Arsenal, it's really hard to do my job when you're prying into my personal life." He went silent, but in a way that assured her that the conversation was not over. Meanwhile, Kairos had taken a look at a dozen different relationships, and Georges seemed to exhibit the same flat disregard in all of them. It was like he had no strong feelings about the people around him, even though to whom he was presumably close, like his wife. There wasn't even dislike, just an extreme disinterest. Kairos had seen this kind of the thing before in non-violent sociopaths, but they usually exhibited a few negative feelings about one relationship or another. This utter flatness was, well, weird.

Georges did leave the room as soon as he finished his drink. Kairos stood up, feeling a little stiff, and said, "I think I'm done here." Arsenal radioed to Red Hood to let him know they were moving back to the hotel while Red and Starfire continued to look around; Kairos would return to the municipal building shortly before sunrise. Instead of going to her room, though, Kairos claimed a place in the shadows on the hotel roof and watched the city not-so-far beneath her. Since sundown in Cherbourg was currently around 10 pm, there wasn't a lot of activity after dark apart from a couple of small bars downtown. Kairos watched the occasional passerby, seeing their feelings about spouses and lovers and friends and family members. She more than anyone knew how weird and complicated relationships could be, and she didn't even want to imagine what her connections to Jason and his team looked like.

Jason. They would have to talk sometime about what had happened. Or not. At the very least they had to start genuinely acting like it hadn't happened so that Roy would get of her back. Her feelings were complicated. There was a certain degree of just plain physical lust; Jason was a handsome and well-built man and she hadn't been with anyone for a while. But another big part of the attraction was that Jason made decisions and _did_ things, and as someone who agonized over every choice, assuming that each one was going to ruin her life, Kairos was strongly drawn to that. Sometimes the decisions he made were perhaps not the best ones, but he made them because he cared deeply about making the world a less shitty place. And his confession regarding the Robins the previous evening had indicated that he knew some of his choices weren't great. And, if she were really honest with herself, she kind of liked the idea of the pissed look on Bruce's face if he knew she had drunkenly kissed his wayward son.

She snorted derisively at herself. That kind of thinking probably indicated that it might be time to consider pulling a Nightwing, setting up in a different city, or maybe working for the League full-time.

Her phone buzzed with a message from Damien: _I demand to know how much longer your truancy will continue._

What a Damien way to say he missed her. Kairos sighed, remembering why leaving Wayne Manor permanently would have to wait. _Dunno, _she typed. _We're almost done in France, but after that, who knows? Everything okay? _

Damien replied almost immediately. _Of course everything is fine, apart from my tutor suddenly disappearing for an indeterminate length of time with no regard for my education. _

_We both know you could just as well tutor yourself, _she wrote back.

_I have read The Rhetoric of Motives twice now and I still think this Kenneth Burke is an idiot! I don't understand why you find him of so much value. _

Kairos was really quite touched, despite the fact that the kid was bad-mouthing one of the preeminent rhetoric scholars of the 20th century. The fact that he hadn't given up on Burke entirely meant that he valued her opinion enough to entertain the possibility that he might be missing something. _We can hash it out when I get back, _she typed. _Maybe I can come home for a few days next week. _

No, she couldn't pull a Nightwing just yet.

With a sharp clattering, there was suddenly a pizza box beside her. A moment later, there was also a bottle of soda and a handful of napkins. "Thought you might be hungry," said Red Hood as he sat down on the other side of the pizza. He had taken off his helmet but left the domino mask, and was quickly shoving a piece of pizza covered in perhaps four different kind of meats into his mouth. Kairos looked tentatively in the box; she wasn't a strict vegetarian by any means but even just looking at that much meat made her feel queasy. Red Hood must have noticed. "I wasn't sure what you liked, " he said, "so I got half with rabbit food just to be safe." Sure enough, half the pizza was covered with spinach and bell peppers, and she eagerly took a slice.

For a long time they sat eating in a slightly awkward silence. The pizza was honestly a little weird; the sauce seemed kinda sweet and the cheese was extra pungent, but Kairos didn't complain. Eventually, when she was sipping on the soda, she said, "Look, I'm really sorry about last night."

"You already said that," Red Hood answered, "and I already told you not to worry about."

Technically when she had said she was sorry, he had only told her not to worry about the panic attack, but if he wanted to continue not naming what had happened, she didn't mind. There was another awkward silence before Kairos blurted out, "Roy won't get off my back so we seriously have to start acting like nothing happened."

"I got us a pizza, didn't I?" he said. "That's prett normal, isn't it?"

It was pretty normal, and Kairos didn't really have anything else to say. The silence dragged on. Kairos settled back to look at the stars, trying to fake a nonchalance she didn't feel. She suddenly wished she wasn't still in her suit; her hands were sweating in her gloves and it was starting to itch. She could think of about eight different things she wanted to say, but couldn't work up the nerve to say any of them, not even to ask about what he and Starfire had found during their scouting. Red Hood finally broke the silence. "You do hungover pretty well. If I hadn't been the one drinking with you I never would have guessed."

"I got a lot of practice in my grad school days," she answered, still trying to feign the nonchalance. "After you teach a class hungover a couple of times, you get good at dealing."

"I'm just glad you're not a puker."

"Nah, the thing that gets me is the joint aches. On bad mornings, I look like an old lady."

Red Hood let out a short bark of laughter, and Kairos relaxed a teeny bit. "You gonna try to get some sleep before you head out?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Slept too much of the day already."

"Then you wanna go down to the docks?"

"The docks?"

"Yeah, isn't this place supposed to have, like, the second largest artificial harbor in the world or something? It must have some docks. Maybe we can stop a mugging or something."

"You want to stop a mugging?"

"I dunno," he answered, standing up and putting on his helmet. "I just want to be moving."

His itchiness was contagious, and Kairos followed him into the night.


	10. Chapter 10

They had stopped a mugging and broken up a couple of drug deals before Red Hood accompanied Kairos to the municipal building and watched her climb into the ventilation system shortly before sunrise. Then he had returned to the hotel, showered again, and settled down with _Moby Dick_ to wait, but his mind wouldn't stay on Ishmael. Instead, he kept rehashing the previous night with Eerie. They had done a good job, he thought, of acting like nothing happened, and they made a decent team on the street. While he had pulled his usual intimidation routine on the first drug dealer they had met, Kairos had talked two partners into turning on each other using what she could see about their relationship; one guy had knocked the other out and then called the cops on him right before Red Hood knocked him out as well and tied him up next to his former partner. It had been like magic, but Eerie had assured him it was only because drug dealers tended to be suspicious and these two had a less than ideal history.

Then they had sat on a roof, passing a bottle of soda back and forth, and talked about all the times they had seen Dick puke. Dick was especially amusing when he vomited, and Kairos laughed hard when Red Hood told her about the time he'd seen a noodle come out his nose. Kairos followed it up with a story about Bruce and Dick going to a nightclub opening to maintain their billionaire playboy images and how Bruce had carried Dick in at the end of the night right before he up-chucked on Alfred. "And you know Alfred," she said, "nothing ever shakes his resolve, but I swear I heard him say 'Bloody hell' under his breath!"

"Hah!" said Red Hood. "I, at least, never made Alfred curse." They sat in a companionable silence; doing something normal like a patrol had lessened his nerves, and Kairos seemed easier too. "So, you and Dick..." He trailed off with a question mark hanging in the air, not really knowing why he felt he had to know.

"Oh please," she said quickly. "I mean, we're friends, really good friends, and he's insinuated a few times that if I ever wanted to move to fuck-buddy stage, he'd be open to it, but no. Never. Ugh."

It made Red Hood feel oddly warm to hear the Golden Boy denounced so thoroughly. "Well you seem to be in a minority," he said.

"Yeah, well, maybe it's the lack of red hair," she answered.

"He certainly does have a type," Jason said.

"He certainly does." Kairos didn't say anything for a few moments, then added, "I noticed that Kori never says anything about him."

"Tricky subject, considering that she slept with his former brother who tried to kill him and is sleeping with his former best friend," Red Hood said a little coldly.

"Forget I asked..."

He interrupted. "Sorry, that's not really it anyway. I don't think she remembers him."

"What?"

"She says that all humans kind of look alike to her if she doesn't see them regularly. I think she remembers being happy with someone, but I don't think she remembers him. I mean, when we first met up, she gave me one of his old suits without batting an eye."

"Weird," said Kairos. "But that does explain a few things." She looked away quickly, realizing how close she was to breaking her code of keeping her mouth shut. "I shouldn't have said that."

"And I'm not going to pry."

Jason had been surprised to find how easy it was to talk about his former family with her, probably because she was sometimes just as snarky and deprecating as he was. And when he said something that was maybe out of line, she didn't chide him or make that disappointed face he had seen on Tim from time to time; she just sailed right over it, like it hadn't happened. And he realized that he didn't really want her to go back to Gotham, and that maybe she didn't either. But he also didn't think she would ever really leave the bats; it was a cushy gig, running around after Bruce and never paying any rent, and sure, they had an island paradise, but they also, he was pretty sure, had the Justice League keeping tabs on all their movements. Not to mention that Interpol had been on his trail for a while now, making normal civilian life a bleak prospect. And dealing with him and Kori and Roy with all their issues could not be easy for her.

But she had kissed him. Of course, she had immediately regretted it, but there had been some kind of impulse there to begin with.

He was startled out of his circling thoughts around three in the afternoon by the buzzing of his phone on the bedside table, the novel still open in front of him. It was a message from Kairos: _Something is definitely up with Georges. I think it's time to confront him_.

Jason felt something in his stomach, some kind of vengeful joy, and all non-Untitled thoughts fled from his mind. _Tonight?_ he wrote back. Then, _You still in the vents?_

_Yes and yes_, she replied. _You all should check out of the hotel; it won't do for Wayne's PA to duck out of a hotel the same night that masked vigilantes attack a town official, if it comes to that_. _I'll meet you outside Georges' house after nightfall._

_You know that Roy and Kori are probably fucking right this moment, don't you?_ Jason typed. _Getting them out of their room won't be easy_. _I have to face Kori's starbolts while you're safely tucked away somewhere._

_Whatever, Todd_.

Jason smirked and crossed the hall to his teammates' room. Sure enough, he heard sounds that definitely suggested fornication coming from inside. He knocked on the door, then called, "Guys, we're leaving in an hour, " before quickly retreating back to his own room. He threw his stuff in his duffle, then attempted to carefully repack Eerie's suitcase. She wasn't exactly a neat person, but she had at least managed to keep her stuff contained to one corner of the room, so it didn't take long to track it all down, including the stupid laptop she was always messing with.

Exactly an hour later, Kori and Roy were waiting for him in the hall, bags in hand. Roy raised an eyebrow at him. "Tonight," was all Jason said, and Roy nodded, hoisting his and Kori's bags and following Jason down the hall.

Jason explained to the clerk at the front desk that they had just heard from some friends who were coming into Paris and were going to try to catch the train in time to meet them that evening. The clerk just smiled; the rooms had been paid for in advance, so she had no worries about the guests leaving. Jason, Kori, and Roy took a cab down to the train station, and then it was just a matter of surreptitiously slipping over to the shipping crate with the spacecraft inside, which ended up taking the better part of an hour.

Despite their earlier activities, Roy and Kori were all business once they got inside, immediately suiting up. "Is Kairos sure it's him?" Roy asked as he double-checked the arrows in his quiver.

"No," Jason admitted from where he was cleaning his guns, "but we've gotten as far as surveillance is going to get us. She says that something is definitely not right with Georges."

"Any idea what we're up against tonight?"

Jason shrugged. "Considering last time, the whole town."

Roy just nodded and went on to look over his bow while Kori sat in a corner, arms crossed, face set in a hard look.

The waiting sucked. After a while, Roy started tinkering with stuff on the ship and Kori sat by him asking questions and making flirtatious comments. Jason took another nap in the co-pilot's chair, but it still felt like forever before it was dark enough for the masks to venture out.

Kairos was waiting for them on the roof of the house across from Georges. "What do you think?" Red Hood asked her immediately.

"He either the worst sociopath I've ever encountered or not human," she said without hesitation. "He appears to feel nothing about other people while inspiring a deep sense of devotion in others. Whatever it is, it's not natural." Jason nodded and started to turn away, but Kairos grabbed his arm. "But I still want to see for myself."

It was a little reminder of their agreement, that she got to verify for herself that their targets were evil pieces of inhuman shit before Red Hood took them out. He hadn't forgotten, but given his previous behavior, he could understand why she felt compelled to remind him. He just nodded again and surveyed the house in front of them, while his team waited for his instructions. Finally, he said, "Kairos and I will go in. If Georges is our target, I'll take care of him. Starfire, you'll be our eyes in the sky; it's possible everyone in town will head toward us when Georges realizes he's in trouble. You'll have to let us know if that's happening. Arsenal, your job is the immediate perimeter of the house; if things get hairy, try to buy us as much time as possible without interruption. I'll let you know when to call the ship. Kairos, when it arrives, you'll take over the controls. Any questions?" No one said anything. "Alright, Kairos, let's go see if you found us a demon or not."

Red Hood climbed down the side of the house as Starfire took off overhead, setting herself in a large circle around their location. Kairos was behind him as he cut through the shadows on the street to the side of the Georges house. The study light was on, and Kairos indicated that he was probably there, but Red Hood instead jimmied the lock on the unlit first floor window. They entered, and he drew a gun, just in case they needed to threaten the wife into silence. Instead, they met no one as they found the stairs and began creeping up slowly, Kairos's steps as light as his own. At the top, he reached the hand not holding a gun behind him to stop her before she bumped into him, and let himself be relieved for a second that he had grabbed her shoulder instead of something less appropriate. She stood completely still behind him; she had pulled her cowl up over her mouth and nose so he couldn't even hear her breathing.

Around the corner was the study, and he heard noises that indicated someone was inside. Peeking around, Red Hood saw Georges sitting at the desk with his back to the door. It was too perfect, which made him suspicious, but being suspicious made him feel confident, so he strode into the study with heavy footfalls. "_Good evening, Georges_," he said in French. "_Lots of work tonight?_"

Georges rose suddenly and spun around. "_Who are you?! What are you doing in my house?!_"

Red Hood casually gestured with his gun. "_Just making sure the right person is home._"

Georges didn't flinch at the sight of the weapon, making Red Hood even more sure of what this was in front of him. Instead the supposed Frenchman's eyes narrowed slightly. "_Whatever do you mean by that?"_ he asked.

Kairos chose that moment to come around the corner. "_We know you are Untitled, Georges_," she said as she walked to Red Hood's side.

"_Whatever do you mean by that?_" Georges repeated, his face impassive.

Red Hood answered by sliding the All-Blades out of their sheaths. "_You know the All-Blades cannot be drawn except in the presence of pure evil,_" he said.

Georges smiled just a tiny bit and his face began to change, sliding down almost like it was melting, replaced by black ooze. The change traveled down the rest of his body, until a black humanoid figure stood in front of them with oily scythes for arms. Red Hood could definitely hear Kairos's breath now, short gasps of air as she felt the hate and rage from the creature wash over her. Jason felt it too, but he had been expecting it, and he couldn't chance taking his eyes off the Untitled to check on her. "Well?" he asked.

Without a second's pause, she said, "Kill it."

Red Hood grinned under his helmet. "With pleasure."

The Untitled smashed through the window behind it, and Red Hood followed.

Kairos watched Red Hood jump out the window after the black form, but for a long second she couldn't move. The Untitled had been...she swallowed hard, took a shaky breath, and tried to push down the overwhelming sense of horror. She walked slowly to the window, but didn't have time to find Red Hood in the dark before Starfire's voice came over the comm. "People have started coming out into the streets. They are heading toward your location."

"Arsenal, call the ship," said Red Hood.

"Roger," said Arsenal.

Kairos shook her head to clear it. "Remember," she said, "these are civilians. Non-lethal force only."

"Yeah, yeah, Daddy Bats," said Arsenal.

Kairos perched on the window ledge and used a grappling hook to climb onto the roof. Red Hood was in the large back yard, swords flashing as the Untitled twisted into alien shapes. Across the street, she could see Arsenal's silhouette, bow drawn and aimed down the street at an incoming group of people. When he released the arrow, it exploded into a large net, knocking most of civilians down and effectively deterring them from joining the Untitled. In the distance, she saw the flash of a starbolt. Standing on the edge of the roof, she threw batarangs with knockout gas at the few people who had evaded Arsenal's net. "Kairos," said Arsenal, "we've got a problem. The ship is jammed."

_Shit_. If one thing was going to choose not to work, it would be the ship. Arsenal and Starfire would do a better job at giving Red Hood cover, so Kairos immediately dropped to the ground and started to run toward the train yard. "I'm on it," she said. "Red Hood is in the back yard."

"Roger," Arsenal said, and Kairos saw him scurry to the top of another house, firing what appeared to be a foam arrow at another oncoming group.

Kairos ran until she was out of the residential area and into downtown. Unfortunately, some of the fanatical townspeople had started to followed her. Once she was downtown, she had two choices: she could take to the rooftops where few would follow, or she could try to lose them in Cherbourg's winding alleys and narrow streets. She evaluated quickly; if she needed to work on the outside of the ship to get it moving, she couldn't do it with maddened civilians crowding her, so she needed to lose them before she got there. If she took to the rooftops, they'd probably be able to follow her on the ground; she needed to get to the ship as quickly as possible and didn't have time for hiding, misleading them, or any of the other ploys she might have used in another scenario. Additionally, the narrow streets and alleys would be perfect for knockout gas, creating substantial obstacles for followers with minimal risk to their safety.

Kairos darted down the first side street she came to, dropping a handful of pressure-sensitive gas pellets behind her. By the time the crowd had followed, she was around another corner, but she could hear their coughing and sputtering when they reached her trap. She kept running, zigzagging down streets and alleys in the general direction of the train yard, dropping gas pellets whenever she heard anyone behind her. The few times someone stepped out in front of her, she used another gas batarang, but she had only started with eight and could only keep that tactic up so long. She was only a couple of minutes from the train yard when the gunfire started. It seemed that the mob had gotten wise to her tricks and was now taking streets parallel to her instead of trying to follow her. It couldn't be more than a half a dozen, but they were working as a team, calling instructions and directions to each other when they spotted her, taking a few shots as well. She was about to climb a nearby roof, hoping that they would keep looking for her on the ground long enough for her to get to the ship, when three men darted in front of her and stopped. Two held handguns and the third wielded a long piece of metal pipe, so she immediately jumped in the middle of them to discourage them from using ranged weapons for fear of hitting one of their own. It worked; one of them men fired a wild shot, probably in attempt to scare her, but she quickly disarmed the other and ducked when the man with the pipe swung and connected with his friend's stomach. She gave pipe-man a swift strike on the back of the head and all three were down.

There was another gun shot, and Kairos turned to see the other group had come up behind her while she was distracted. _Stupid_, she thought. _So stupid._

Then her right shoulder exploded in pain and she realized that this time the gunman had made his mark.

She threw a handful of small explosives toward the men and in the ensuing chaos ran as hard and as fast as she could, making a beeline for the train yard and holding her right arm to her chest. She couldn't fight anyone in this state. Luckily the small explosion had distracted any other pursuers, and, even better, the ship wasn't actually jammed; it just hadn't been able to maneuver out the front of the container. She flung herself in the pilot seat, eased the ship out the door, and set it to home in on Arsenal's signal. "I'm in the air, Arsenal," she said.

"Good," he answered, breathing hard, "because we gotta get outta here."

Kairos pulled her cowl down around her neck and spared a look at her shoulder. There wasn't an exit hole in the front. Her suit had been designed for flexibility more than protection, and the joints especially had minimal armour to allow a fuller range of motion. What protection was there hadn't been enough to stop the bullet, but it had slowed it down enough to prevent it coming out the other side, so that bullet was still in there somewhere.

She pushed the thought out of her mind and took a deep breath, running quickly through the pain management meditation Bruce had taught her as the spacecraft glided over the area she had just run through and hovered over the Georges house. Arsenal was still on the roof, keeping anyone from passing the front of the house, while Starfire shot starbolts at anyone approaching from the back. In the middle, Red Hood continued to fight the Untitled, who had lost one of its scythe arms and was definitely moving slower. As she watched, Red Hood swiped both his blades across his chest, cutting down to the skin, and the blades began to glow. "Land the ship!" ordered Arsenal, and Kairos acquiesced, hearing his feet his the top when he jumped from the roof. "Hood, you gotta wrap this up now!"

Red Hood's voice was a bit belabored when he said, "But it's so much fun."

"Do it, Hood," yelled Starfire, "or I'll have to start killing people!"

Arsenal stormed up the boarding ramp, and Kairos scrambled from the pilot seat, moving to the ramp so she could see. He sat down and punched a few buttons, and the ship fired a volley of electricity at an approaching civilian. "Almost done!" yelled Red Hood, and an inhuman scream underlined his statement.

"Starfire, get onboard," yelled Arsenal, and the alien was almost immediately swooping past Kairos to take the co-pilot seat. Arsenal fired one more burst of electricity at a pair chasing Red Hood as he ran toward the boarding ramp, sheathing his swords on the way. Kairos stepped back to get out of his way.

It didn't matter. He ran straight to her, pressing her against the back wall and pulling off his helmet, kissing her hard as it clattered to the floor. Her mind went deliciously blank as she felt his hands at her waist; her right arm was pressed between their bodies, but her left hand grabbed the hair at his neck. She felt the sensation of motion and wasn't sure if Arsenal was taking off or she was just floating. Jason pulled her body closer, deepening the kiss, and she responded by wrapping her fingers more tightly in his hair.

"I do not like interrupting such open displays of emotion," she heard Starfire say distantly, "but you are wounded."

Jason pulled back, glancing down at his cuts. "It's nothing, Kori," he said, looking back at Kairos, smiling. Then the smile dropped as his eyes settled over her shoulder, and Kairos guessed that her bullet wound had left a bloody spot on the wall. She also guessed that the lightheadedness she was feeling wasn't just from the kiss. "I think I should sit down," she said weakly, Jason catching her as she slumped forward. He set her down on the floor, saying, "How do I disarm your suit?" Glad that Jason had remembered before electrocuting himself, Eerie reached up her left hand to awkwardly fiddle with the small mechanism behind the stylized right point of her mask, then tripped a similar mechanism at the back of her neck while Jason pulled the mask off. He moved behind her and unzipped the top half of her uniform, pushing it off her body. She heard him suck in air and say, "You got shot," but before she could reply, he prodded the wound, and the wave of pain pushed her into darkness.


	11. Chapter 11

A parade of curses streamed through Jason's head as he surveyed Eerie's wound. A shoulder shot wasn't life threatening, but it looked like the bullet was still in there and she had lost a lot of blood, was still losing it. When they got back to the island, he'd have to fish the hunk of metal out and she'd probably need a transfusion. Jason had followed Bruce's habit of monthly blood collection with Roy and even Kori for these situations, but hadn't thought about storing any of Eerie's since she was strictly there for research and recon. "Omni," he said, addressing Roy's computer, "do you know Eerie's blood type?"

"NEGATIVE, RED HOOD," the computer answered.

"What's going on back there?" asked Roy.

"Bullet wound, right shoulder," Jason answered.

"They had guns in that town?!" Roy said incredulously.

Jason ignored him. "Kori, get some bandages out of my duffle and put some pressure on this."

His brain worked furiously as Kori moved to comply. He needed to contact one of the bats; they would all know her blood type. Roy was O+, so if she was + anything, then great. If not, then they'd have to make a pit stop at a hospital along the way. Unfortunately, most bats would be inclined to believe that he shot her, so that limited his options. Making a decision, Jason pulled out his phone and dialed Tim's number.

"Hello?"

Jason wasted no time with preliminaries. "I need to know Eerie's blood type."

"A+," Tim said immediately and Jason let out the breath he had been holding. "What happened?"

"Bullet wound, right shoulder."

"Update me later?" This was why Jason had called Tim; the kid immediately realized that Jason didn't have time to give him all the details.

"Will do," he said and ended the call.

"Well?" said Roy.

"A+."

"Oh thank God. I am not in the mood for ransacking a hospital."

Kori had been perplexed when Jason and Roy tried to explain blood types - apparently Tamaraneans didn't have them - but she understood the implications. "The sooner we get home the better," she said. "Putting pressure on the wound is causing her pain."

After a nerve-wracking hour-and-a-half flight, Roy set them down on the island. Eerie came to just as Jason laid her down on a table in the home ship's small med bay. "You got shot," Jason said as he dug around in a drawer for some forceps and antiseptic. Roy was already pulling a bag of his own blood out of a small fridge.

"I know," she mumbled.

"I have to get the bullet out and stitch you up, and then we're going to give you some of Roy's blood," Jason continued as he pulled off her top and dropped it on the floor, deciding that the racer-back bra underneath wasn't in the way.

"A+."

"I know. I called Tim."

Jason was grabbing the forceps from their antiseptic bath when Kori, who was helping Roy find something to attach the blood bag to, suddenly said, "Something bad is about to happen." He paused and looked up at her, seeing Roy do the same. Her eyes were wide with terror and she was clenching and unclenching her hands. "Roy, the humans are coming for me. They're going to take me away and do tests on me. Please, Roy, make it them stop, please, please, don't let it happen."

Kori grabbed at Roy, and Jason saw his eyes go wide as well. "She's right, Jason," he said. "Something bad is happening." Roy's face had gone white and he looked around the room nervously. Kori was sobbing on his chest, muttering incoherently.

Jason felt it too, and uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. Sure, this was a stressful situation, but he hadn't felt this kind of anxiety about first aid since his return from the grave. It was like the sudden onset of a mass panic attack, like there was free-floating anxiety filling the room like a gas.

He looked down at his patient. "Eerie, I think you're projecting. Can you stop?"

After a second, she muttered, "Sedative." Jason grabbed a tranquilizer from his belt and stuck it in her arm, watching her eyelids flutter shut. Almost instantly, the pressure on his chest receded and Kori's tears quieted. "What the hell just happened?" said Roy.

Jason immediately went to work removing the bullet. "Eerie was projecting," he said as he poked the forceps into the hole. "She does it unconsciously when she's under stress."

"That sucked balls," Roy replied. Kori didn't say anything, her face still buried on Roy's chest.

"Yeah, it did, but she needs some blood."

Roy got back to work with hooking up the blood bag as Jason got the forceps on the bullet and pulled it out with a sucking sound. He cleaned the wound with some of the antiseptic and began stitching it up as neatly as possible while Roy started an IV.

A few hours later, Jason sat in Eerie's room, watching her sleep. After the transfusion had finished, he had carried her as gently as possible to her temporary bed. Then he had patched up the cuts on his chest, sent a quick message to Tim, and retrieved a bottle of cheap tequila from under his own bed before beginning his vigil.

As soon as he had started the IV and seen that Jason could manage on his own, Roy had led Kori back to their room. She hadn't moved since Eerie had stop projecting, just stood there with her hands covering her face. Jason figured that with her emotional nature, Kori had felt Eerie's projected anxiety worse than he or Roy. It was a strange thing, he thought as he took another sip of tequila, to realize that he had come to accept a certain level of anxiety as normal, so that it had taken him longer to understand that something out of the ordinary was happening. He wondered if Eerie had ever had the same realization. And he wondered, not for the first time, what it was like in Kori's mind. He was a little jealous of the way things seemed to just roll off her back. Even today's trauma would be forgotten by the time she woke up the next day.

Instead he sat vigil. With Eerie, sure, but also with his guilt. On one level, it was the guilt that every leader felt when a team member was injured, and that was fine. But what was really eating him up was that he had forced himself on Eerie without even noticing that she was hurt. She had been bleeding everywhere! What the hell was his problem!

He wasn't even sure what he had meant by the kiss. It had been complete impulse; he was just so happy that he was alive and she was there and he wanted to be close to her to celebrate their aliveness. Even now he wanted to scoot the chair close to her bed, to reach out and hold her hand.

Instead he forced himself to stay on the opposite side of the room. Instead he was sending her home as soon as possible. He would only hurt her or get her hurt if she stayed.

Eerie woke with the feeling that she had been dreaming about Scooby Doo and the Mystery Machine, which meant that she had been unconscious. Then she felt the pain shooting down her arm and through her chest and remembered why. She opened her eyes to find herself in her room on the island, and turned her head to see Jason propped up in a chair, bottle dangling from his hand, head tucked to his chest. She was so thirsty, and conveniently someone had placed a glass of water by her bed, but when she tried to sit up to grab it with her left hand, a loud groan pushed past her lips. Jason startled awake, dropping the bottle and blinking owlishly. Almost immediately he was holding the water to her lips and she was drinking greedily, downing half the glass. Then just as quickly, he was back on the other side of the room and she felt disgruntled at the loss of the warm presence of his body next to hers.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Okay." It was a completely inadequate way to describe how she was feeling: in pain, elated at the memory of the kiss, extremely tired but unwilling to let a moment with him to be lost to sleep. Underneath that was a layer of shame that she had let herself get caught in such a rookie mistake and that she felt like such a preteen girl. But it was still better than the standard "Like I got shot" line. "How long since Cherbourg?" she asked instead.

"About ten hours."

"Sorry about projecting."

"Don't worry about it." She knew she should worry, though, when she saw a wave of sympathy pass along his thread to Kori. She would have to deal with the fallout as best she could later.

And then a long awkward silence. It slowly dawned on her how uncomfortable he looked, and she felt her face fall. "What's wrong?" she said. "Did someone get hurt?"

Jason snorted. "You did."

"That's not what I..."

He held up a hand to stop her. "Eerie, Roy is going to take you back to Gotham tomorrow."

"I'm not hurt that bad."

"You got shot!"

"Yeah, but I can heal up here just as well as there. Even better without Damian on my back. Besides, why are you telling instead of asking? Don't I get some say in this?"

Jason squared his jaw. "The kiss was a mistake. Near-death experience horniness. I don't want to fuck you up anymore than you already are."

A completely separate pain from the pain in her shoulder shot through her chest and stomach. He thought she was fucked up. He thought she was weak, so weak that just being around him would throw her life into disarray. She felt her mouth hanging open.

Jason was already walking to the door. "There's some pain meds on the table. You leave in four hours. Try to get some more sleep in the meantime."

_Fuck you_, she thought, pushing down the pain and squaring her shoulders as best she could. _I'll show you who's fucked up. _"What about the job?" she said. "I signed on for more than one Untitled."

Jason stopped but didn't turn around to face her. She could tell he was trapped. He wanted to be rid of her, but he wanted to be rid of the Untitled more, and it was going to be so much harder to do it without her. "We can pick it back up when you're better," he said slowly. "If you want to." And then he was gone.

Eerie remained sitting up as long as she could, just in case he came back in the room. She wasn't entirely sure what had just happened, but she refused to look weak in front of him ever again. _Fucked up_, she thought. Eerie knew she was not the most emotionally stable person - she had brain chemicals to blame for that - but the fact that she owned it and took steps to constrain its effects in her life was exactly what made her not fucked up. Besides, where did Jason Todd get off calling anyone fucked up! He had been the poster child for fucked up since he tried to kill his former father figure and pseudo-foster brothers.

Her anger didn't hold her up long, however, and after a few minutes of silently raging with a clenched jaw, Eerie felt the pain in her shoulder again. She took a couple of the pain pills with the rest of the water and lay back down as gently as possible. Almost immediately, tears started seeping out from her closed eyelids and running down her face to the pillow. She cried not because of any particular emotion but because she was completely overwhelmed by all of them. She had been injured in the field before, but this was her first bullet wound, and she was hurt and a little scared and really wanted Alfred or Dick or even Bruce there to tell her that it was going to be fine, that everyone got shot eventually. She was angry at Jason for not being reassuring just as much as she was angry at him for being a dick. She was ashamed of getting shot in the first place, of her complete loss of control in the med bay, of apparently getting used by Jason in his "post-near-death experience horniness" and enjoying it. And she was sad at being rejected so completely by someone she had started to really like.

She felt full-up, so she cried.

She must have cried herself to sleep because a few hours later, she woke with a start to a knock on her door. "Yeah," she said groggily, wiping a hand over her face and fortunately finding it dry.

Arsenal came in and said, "You ready to go?"

Eerie glanced around the room. Her uniform top was sitting on the chair with her cape and mask. Her boots were on the floor next to her new suitcase and green backpack, all packed and ready to go. Jason had taken the liberty, she guessed, probably to get rid of her as quickly as possible. She wasn't sure, though, if she hoped that he hadn't seen her or that he had and felt like shit. "I guess so," she said, getting out of the bed. She was still wearing her dark gray pants and sports bra and managed to get her boots on herself, but Arsenal had to help her zip the back of her top after she struggled into it. Putting on the cape and mask, she grabbed the handle of the backpack and walked out the door, leaving the suitcase behind.

They made the short flight to Gotham in silence. The pain meds had put Kairos a little out of sorts, but she couldn't not see the threads attaching Arsenal to Kori and Jason. They burned with sense of fierce protection, but the dark look on Arsenal's face and the lack of jokes told her that protection was not currently extended to her. She wondered what Jason had told him to make him glower so. More likely, Jason hadn't told him anything at all beyond the fact that Eerie was returning to Gotham, and Arsenal had jumped to his own conclusions about what had transpired behind closed doors. Once more, she thought, _Fuck you, Jason Todd_. But she also felt some guilt; her projections must have hit Kori hard to cause this kind of response from easy-going Arsenal.

Neither spoke until Arsenal sat the spacecraft down in the same park where he had picked Red Hood and Kairos up. "I'm sorry about the projections," she said. "Please tell Kori I'm sorry too."

"Whatever," he said, not looking at her.

Kairos got up out of the copilot seat, picked up her bag, and moved toward the ramp. Arsenal's voice pulled her up short. "Jason may not be perfect," he said, "but he does not deserve your shit. He's too good for you anyway."

"Maybe you should double-check who's giving who shit," she answered darkly and stalked off the ship. Arsenal took off again as soon as she was disembarked, and Kairos turned her communicator on in her mask. "Batcave, this is Kairos. You there?"

Alfred's voice came over the speaker in her ear. "Kairos, this is Penny One. Do you need assistance?"

"It's good to hear you, Penny One," she answered, meaning every word. "I need a pick up at Presby State Park."

"I'll see what I can do," said Alfred. A minute later, he was back. "Kairos, Batman is en route. ETA ten minutes."

"Thanks, Penny One." Normally, Kairos would have climbed into one of the nearby trees to wait, but she couldn't in her current condition. Jason could have at least given her a couple of days to heal before kicking her out. Just another reason he was an asshole. Instead, she hunkered down in some underbrush to wait for the Batmobile.

Ten minutes later, just as Alfred had promised, the Batmobile arrived. As she got in the passenger side, throwing the backpack in the storage area behind the seats, Batman said, "What's wrong?"

"I got shot," she answered. "Right shoulder."

"When?" he asked as he pulled back onto the highway.

"Yesterday, so no need to rush home."

He grunted in response and turned on the comm. "Penny One," he said, "Kairos is coming in with a bullet wound, so prep the med bay."

"Red Hood took care of it," she said. She couldn't bring herself to use his first name yet; Batman would be sure to pick up on her anger and that would only bring uncomfortable questions.

"Alfred will still take a look at it." He never even took his eyes off the road. "Who did it?"

Kairos was pretty sure that he had assumed that Jason had been the one to shoot her until she had indicated that he had patched her up. "Some brainwashed French guy," she answered.

"The case?"

"We took out one bad guy. Only about ten to go."

"Did Red Hood…"

Kairos didn't want him to finish that sentence. "It was demonic, pure evil, and Red Hood eliminated it."

Batman grunted again.

They ended up stopping at a liquor store robbery, but Kairos waited in the car as Batman took care of business. By the time they got back to the cave, Alfred had pulled out and cleaned all manner of medical equipment and Damian was pacing imperiously around the med bay. "Todd will pay for what he has done!" he announced as soon as Kairos eased herself out of the car.

_Yes he will_, she thought, but instead she said, "Easy, D, he wasn't the shooter."

Damian glared at her skeptically for a moment, then said, "Well, he has done many other things worth retribution."

"Damian," Bruce said, removing his cowl and gloves, "take Eerie's backpack to one of the guest rooms." Damian glared at his father then huffily pulled the backpack out of the Batmobile and stomped up the stairs.

In the meantime, Alfred had already started removing Eerie's cape and suit, stripping her to her underwear and guiding her to a waiting table. Bruce watched as Alfred removed the bandages to examine the wound. "It is good to have you back," said Alfred, "though I would have prefered you returned in better condition."

"It's just the one bullet hole," she said, pushing away the paranoid feeling that Alfred could see into her roiling mind.

"All the same, Miss Eerie. Was the bullet removed?"

"Yeah."

"Excellent. I'll just tidy up these stitches then. Stitches never were Master Jason's forte."

Alfred got to work, spraying on a localized anesthetic and carefully working with needle and thread. Bruce continued to look at her. "You shouldn't have been traveling," he said finally.

"Red Hood wanted me back here ASAP."

"Was he unsure of his first aid treatment? Is the wound likely to become infected?"

"Not that I know of."

Bruce didn't like that answer, but Eerie didn't bother to volunteer any more information. He changed subjects. "How do you feel about the mission?"

"The things Red Hood is after, the Untitled, they're bad news. They've been content to lay low for several centuries, in part because of the All-Caste keeping them in line, but with the All-Caste gone, I'd hate to see what would happen if they decided to aspire to something other than comfortable survival."

"You said something about brainwashing."

"They inspire this fanatical devotion without exhibiting any strong feelings for others. It's the kind of threads I see in the Joker, but worse. The Joker at least has strong feelings about you. I haven't been able to determine how the Untitled do it, but it is definitely not their rhetoric."

Bruce studied her for a minute. "And they aren't human?"

"Not any more."

He turned to head toward the changing area. "It sounds like Jason has found a worthwhile project."

Eerie didn't say anything. The reminder of Jason's basic goodness angered her a bit, but it also made a lump form in her throat. Alfred must have sensed it. "Are you alright, Miss Eerie?" he asked from behind her.

"I'm tired," she said, "and really overwhelmed."

"Yes, well, one's first bullet wound is always taxing." She felt him apply a clean bandage with tape to her shoulder. "Perhaps something for the pain and a spot of herbal tea will help set you right."

"I hope so."


End file.
